K. A. Applegate The Extreme (Animorphs No. 25) Converted from RTF


  The Extreme (Animorphs No. 25)

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Begin Content

The extreme

Even the book morphs!

Flip the pages

and check it out!

Look for other

titles by K.A. Applegate:

#1 The Invasion?MEGAMORPHS?

#2 The Visitor#1 The Andalite's Gift

#3 The Encounter#2 In the Time of Dinosaurs

#4 The Message

#5 The Predator

#6 The Capture

#7 The Stranger

#8 The Alien

#9The SecretThe Hork-Bajir Chronicles

#10The Android

#11The Forgotten

#12The Reaction

#13The Change

#14The Unknown

#15The Escape

#16The Warning

#17The Underground

#18The Decision

#19The Departure

#20The Discovery

#21The Threat

#22The Solution

#23The Pretender

#24The Suspicion

A. K APPLEGATE

PAPERBACK

SCHOLASTIC INC.

New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney Mexico City New Delhi Hong Kong

The author wishes to thank Jeffrey Zuehlke for his help in preparing
this manuscript.

For Michael and Jake

Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly

No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding
permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department,
555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

ISBN 0-590-76258-3

Copyright 1999 by Katherine Applegate. All rights reserved. Published
by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, APPLE PAPERBACKS, ANIMORPHS and
associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of
Scholastic Inc.

12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 39/9 0 1 2 3/0

Printed in the U.S.A.40

First Scholastic printing, January 1999

1 My name is Marco.

I doubt we've ever met, but I'll bet you know somebody like me. Every
class has a Marco. You know, the one who's the smartest, wittiest, most
charming, coolest, and the best-looking.

That's me.

I can't tell you my last name. I can't tell you where I live, either, or
anything specific about me that might help certain people find me.

Believe me, I wish I could. Anonymity has its downside. Last week, for
example, I wanted to run through the halls of my school screaming my
name so everyone could hear. I wanted to hop on a cafeteria table and
dance on somebody's Tater

2 Tots until a hall monitor came to drag me away. I wanted to call an
assembly so everyone could congratulate me.

I'd gotten a date.

And not just any date. A date with the most beautiful girl in our whole
school. If not the whole world.

Marian.

Not only is Marian gorgeous, with long, black hair, deep, dark eyes, and
dimples that make me want to cry every time she smiles. She's also
nearly as smart, charming, and charismatic as I am.

You can see we're a perfect couple. The only flaw I can find in her is
that she doesn't seem to think my jokes are very funny.

That, and her taste in music.

You want to know the coolest thing of all about this date? Marian asked
me out. I didn't have to do a thing. We were just leaving our music
appreciation class together when Marian said to me:

"Wow, Marco, you really seem to know a lot about classical music. And
may I say, you are an unusually handsome, manly man. I want you, I want
you now."

Okay, that maybe a slight exaggeration. But she definitely said the part
about me knowing a lot about music.

3 "Either that, or I can scam teachers like no one else around," I said.

Actually, I know next to nothing about classical music. But my dad's got
a huge collection of classical CD's. Sometimes he'll hog the TV,
watching documentaries about Mozart and Beethoven and other wild-eyed guys.

"Well, I have tickets to Symphony Hall this Sunday afternoon," Marian
said. "They're playing Beethoven's Third. It's my absolute favorite
symphony. Do you want to come?"

"Well, I'm more of a fan of his thirty-third," I said, hoping I wouldn't
pass out at her feet. Marian had just asked me out on a date!

Marian gave me a quizzical look. "His thirty-third? I don't get it. Were
you making a joke?"

"Of course! It's a joke, hah HAH!" I said, sounding only slightly
hysterical. "I love Beethoven's Third. It's just so ..." I wasn't sure
what to say. I'd never heard the thing before in my life. Marian looked
at me eagerly, waiting for me to finish my sentence.

"It's just so ..."

"Beautiful?" Marian suggested.

"Yes!" I replied. "That's a perfect word for it. Although I was leaning
toward exquisite. Maybe even rapturous."

"Oh, yes!" Marian cried. "It's all those things! So will you come?"

4 "Sure," I squeaked.

"Wonderful." Marian opened one of her notebooks and scribbled in it. She
tore the sheet off and handed it to me. "Here's my number. Call me and
we'll make plans."

"Okay," I said, casually stuffing the sheet of paper into my pocket. I
was going to have it framed as soon as I got home, but Marian didn't
have to know that.

"This is going to be so much fun." Marian sighed. She smiled and her
dimples made my heart skip a half-dozen beats. Then she reached out with
her beautiful hand and touched me on my arm. My whole body tingled.

Either I had a major crush, or the cafeteria had served tainted meat again.

"Talk to you," she said, walking away.

"Uh-huh," I grunted.

Now this sounds pretty cool, huh? I mean, what more could a guy want
than to be asked out on a date by the most beautiful girl in his school,
right? For any normal kid, living a normal life, this would be, like,
the high point of his entire existence.

Unfortunately, I'm not a normal kid. And I definitely do not lead a
normal life.

Sure, parts of it are normal. I go to school. Do homework when I feel
like it. Eat dinner with my

5 dad. Watch TV. Play video games with my best buddy, Jake, and kick his
sorry butt.

But there's another part of my life that's anything but normal. In fact,
it's so bizarre, so insane, so absolutely out there that I wouldn't
believe it myself if I weren't living it.

You see, I'm sort of a superhero. No, not Batman, although that's a good
guess, with that whole very cool, handsome billionaire Bruce Wayne
thing. Not Spider-Man, either. But I do fly, stick to walls, and toss
bad guys around like they're plastic action figures.

Superheroes use their special powers to save the world. And that's what
my five friends and I are doing.

Saving the world. Not from clowns like Lex Luthor or the Joker. I wish
our archenemies were as tame as a bunch of comic book supervillains.

Instead, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias the Bird-boy, the Andalite Ax, my best
friend Jake, and I are battling an entire race of aliens who are trying
to conquer Earth.

The Yeerks.

For your sake, I hope you've never heard of them. Because almost the
only people who do know about them are the ones who've become their slaves.

6 The Yeerk invasion is a secret. But it's happening.

Believe me, it's happening.

The Yeerks are slimy gray slugs that slip into your ear and wind
themselves in and around every crevice of your brain. Once they've done
this, they own you. Control you. They've enslaved you.

You become something we call a Controller. Someone with no free will.
You can't scream for help, because the Yeerk controls what words come
out of your mouth. You can't run, because the Yeerk controls how far and
how fast your feet move. And you can't resist when the Yeerk in your
head starts to recruit your family and friends into enslavement. Because
you're a slave yourself.

Pretty scary, huh? But maybe the scariest thing of all about this alien
invasion is that you can't tell Controllers from normal people. They
look normal. Talk normal. Act normal.

For all you know, your parents may be Controllers. Maybe even your cute,
loveable grandmother has designs on subduing the planet.

So fighting this war - and it is a war - tends to make a guy kind of
paranoid. You can't trust anybody.

That's why I didn't tell you my name. And that's why, ever since we took
a shortcut through

7 an abandoned construction site one night, life, which I always want to
find funny, has been mostly grim.

It was in that construction site that we met the dying Andalite prince,
Elfangor. It was there that he told us about the Yeerks. It was there
that he gave us the nightmarish power to become any animal whose DNA we
could acquire. Our one pitiful weapon.

Ever since then, I have not been able to look at another human being
without suspicion. No one. Not even Marian.

And that's why, after experiencing those first few moments of joy after
Marian asked me out, the suspicion began to seep into my brain. The
gnawing little worm of doubt. What if she was one of them? What if
sweet, perfect Marian, with those gorgeous dimples, was a Controller?

Sure, I might not mind being Marian's slave, but being a Yeerk's slave
is a different story.

One date, I told myself. Then, before we decide to go steady, I can
check her out.

8 "So then what happened?" Cassie asked me in study hall the day after
what had come to be called The Big Date.

Study hall was being held in the school gym this week. They'd closed our
usual classroom. Something about asbestos and lawsuits.

So instead of studying silently for an hour, a bunch of kids were
playing basketball and volleyball while the rest of us, me and Cassie
included, sat on the bleachers and talked. It was a big improvement.

"Well, after I failed in a bold attempt to escape during intermission,
we went back in and the orchestra started to play. Again. And they
played. And played. And I considered yelling

9 'Fire!' just to get outta the place. And when I woke up everybody was
gone, including Marian."

Cassie laughed her gentle laugh. "Oh, well," she said, flipping idly
through a veterinary medicine magazine she'd pulled out of a folder. "It
sounds like it was for the best."

"What do you mean, it was for the best?" I cried. "It was a total
disaster."

"Yes. But it doesn't sound like Marian's your type."

"But she's the most beautiful girl in the whole school," I replied. "How
could she not be my type?" I gave Cassie the fish eye. "Wait a minute.
Did you guys watch her?"

"We are your friends, Marco," she said apologetically. "We had no choice."

"You guys kept her under surveillance for the last three days?"

"Well, it was mostly Tobias and Ax, since they don't have school.
Anyway, she's not one of them. She never went near a ..." She lowered
her voice to a whisper. "... Yeerk pool entrance."

I wasn't sure how to react to that. Yeerks have to return to the hidden
Yeerk pool every three days. Marian was okay. Now the question was: Was
this good news or bad news? I'd blown my big chance. Was it better or
worse that she was a normal girl?

10 Something else bothered me. Jake had asked Cassie to tell me this.
Obviously. It was a good choice. Typical Jake. He knew that Rachel would
just ridicule me. He knew that if he talked to me himself it would seem
like he was meddling. But Cassie had the gentle touch. The diplomatic
skill to let me know, without making me mad, that they had watched my
temporary girlfriend behind my back.

Cassie was watching me, waiting for my reaction. And I was just loading
up to deliver something scathing-yet-not-overly-cruel when a shadow fell
over us. I looked up.

"Hey, Marco. Hey, Cassie. What's up?"

It was a kid my age. He was a little bit taller than I am - which, I'll
admit, is how it is with most people. His warm, confident smile made you
want to like him immediately.

But I knew better. See, this particular likeable-looking kid wasn't a
kid, and his smile wasn't a smile. Erek didn't attend our school. Erek
didn't attend the human race.

The kid standing in front of us wasn't entirely real. What Cassie and I
and everyone else were looking at was a holographic projection.
Underneath the projection was an android. An android that had been
walking the earth for hundreds of thousands of years.

Erek and his other android friends are called

11 Chee. They were the companions of an ancient race called the
Pemalites. The Pemalites may have been the most advanced species ever to
exist in the history of the universe. So advanced they forgot all about
primitive stuff like wars and worry and sadness.

Unfortunately, the rest of the universe wasn't so elevated. An evil race
called Howlers attacked the Pemalites and destroyed their home world.
Some survivors fled to Earth, but before they escaped, their alien
attackers infected them with a disease that eventually killed them all.

The Chee, being androids, weren't affected by the disease. To honor the
spirits of their former companions and creators, they infused the
essence of the Pemalites into the bodies of wolves.

Now you know why your dog is always in such a good mood.

And since the Pemalites created the Chee in their own image, the Chee
are pretty friendly themselves. In fact, they're pacifists, sworn - and
programmed - never to harm another soul.

Still, they hate the Yeerks and help us out whenever they can.

"Uh-oh," I said, still feeling a bit cranky over the possibility that
Tobias had been watching Marian through her bedroom window.

And I hadn't.

12 " 'Uh-oh'? Nice welcome," Erek said, sitting down between us. "Would
you mind if we talk in private?"

"I repeat: uh-oh."

The air around us began to glow. The sounds of the gym - kids talking,
the bouncing of the basketball, the squeak of sneakers on the court -
disappeared. We could see everything happening in the gym, but it was as
if we were looking out from inside a Saran Wrap bubble.

"I have extended my holographic projection to include the three of us,"
Erek explained. The Erek we were looking at now was a steel-and-ivory
android that looked an awful lot like a dog, maybe a greyhound, standing
on his hind legs. "Everyone else in the gym sees and hears the three of
us talking about last night's game."

"Well, if that's all you want to talk about, why all the secrecy?" I
said brightly.

Erek smiled grimly. Not brightly. I felt the sense of another "uh-oh"
growing inside me.

"What is it, Erek?" Cassie said.

"Our sources tell us the Yeerks have been trying to develop a way to
broadcast Kandrona rays using human satellite technology," Erek told us.
"They seem to have found some place on this planet isolated enough to
allow them to erect a satellite station without interference. If they're

13 successful, they could turn every backyard swimming pool in the world
into a Yeerk pool."

I felt sick to my stomach. "That is definitely not good."

Kandrona rays are what the Yeerks consume. Their food. They absorb it
when they're in the Yeerk pool. It's their Achilles heel. They need the
rays to survive.

Every three days when Yeerks go down to the Yeerk pool, they slide out
of their host's brain and take a Kandrona bath. Meanwhile, most of the
hosts, the ones who don't want to be slaves, scream and cry and struggle
and beg to be set free.

I've been to the Yeerk pool. It's a bad place.

We've imagined destroying the Yeerk pool. It would be a huge blow to the
Yeerks. And we would if we could, but the place is about the size of a
football stadium, with better defenses than the White House, the
Pentagon, and Fort Knox put together. We just don't have the firepower.

"You know, Erek," I said, "nothing personal, but sometimes I'm not so
sure I like you. You're nothing but trouble."

Erek grinned his steel-and-ivory dog grin. "Sure you're not just cranky
over blowing The Big Date?"

I shot Cassie an outraged look.

14 She winced. "Okay, so the Chee helped us out. It's not easy to watch
someone for three days."

"Swell. Is there anyone, anywhere who doesn't know that I crashed and
burned on The Big Date?"

"She wasn't your type, anyway," Erek said. "She had taste in music."

"Oh, so you're a big Beethoven fan?"

Erek nodded his android head. "I was the maestro's valet for quite a few
years. He was an awful person, but he made music my masters would have
wept to hear."

15 We met after school in Cassie's barn - aka the Wildlife
Rehabilitation Clinic - to discuss the situation. Cassie's parents are
veterinarians. While her dad runs the clinic, her mom runs the vet staff
at The Gardens, an amusement park and zoo. Cassie helps out at the
clinic, giving suppositories to cranky skunks and stuff. And let's face
it: A wildlife clinic definitely comes in handy when we need to acquire
a new morph.

The get-together was like opening night of the local freak show. Four
kids who regularly become fur balls. Erek, the ancient Android. Tobias,
the red-tailed hawk, keeping a lookout from the rafters. Ax, the
Andalite, in his human morph.

Ax's human morph is a combination of DNA

16 from me, Jake, Rachel, and Cassie. Together we make one disturbingly
beautiful person.

Ax is the only Andalite on Earth. In fact, he's Prince Elfangor's
younger brother. Ax was in his human morph because, well, let me put it
this way: Cassie's mom and dad are about the coolest parents you'll ever
find, but if they were to walk in and find their daughter shooting the
breeze with a blue-furred, half-humanoid, half-deerlike creature with a
mean scorpion tail, no mouth and four eyes, including a pair that sat on
swiveling stalks atop its head ... they would definitely freak.

"Do you know any more details?" Rachel asked Erek.

Rachel is your basic psycho-babe. And I mean that in a nice way. She's a
tall, willowy, supermodelesque blond. You might think she was a mall-rat
airhead - until you called her an airhead. Then, after she removed your
left kidney, you'd realize your mistake.

Rachel's a great person to have on your side in a fight. The only
problem I have with her is that she's always looking for a fight.

"Details? I'm afraid not," Erek replied. "We've infiltrated much of the
Yeerk force, but we don't have access to everything."

"Nothing at all about the location of the facility?" Jake asked.

17 "No. Just that Visser Three will be visiting it very soon. We do know
this: We've discovered the location of the Visser's new feeding pasture.
It's close enough for you to fly there in bird morph. A Bug fighter is
going to pick him up there tomorrow afternoon to go off and inspect this
site."

Jake got his "Jake look." The sort of weary, worried expression he gets
when he's faced with some decision that may result in all of us ending
up dead.

Jake, who is Rachel's cousin, is our sort-of leader. Not because he
asked to be. It's probably because he'd never ask to be. You know - he's
one of those tiresomely dutiful, levelheaded guys. If you met Jake,
you'd understand why we turn to him. Call it charisma. Something about
Jake commands respect.

Not from me, of course. He's been my best friend forever. I was with him
when he was nine and ate an entire pie on a bet and ended up blowing
blueberries for an hour.

Jake looked around at all of us. Not exactly asking for a vote, but
obviously wanting to hear from us.

"So, no problem, right?" Tobias said. "We fly out to Visser Three's
feeding place and when the Bug fighter arrives, we hitch a ride."

"That appears to be our only option."

18 "Shun. Shunn," Ax confirmed. Andalites don't have mouths. They
communicate in thought-speak. So whenever Ax does his human morph, he's
fascinated by the sounds he makes.

By the way, he's the only one who's fascinated.

I held up my hand like I wanted to ask a question in class. "I'm not
allowed to hitchhike. Especially not with evil alien parasites. My dad
is very definite about that."

Jake managed a brief laugh. Rachel gave me her "what are you, a moron?"
look.

"It doesn't sound like my idea of a good time, either," Cassie said.
"But if it's true the Yeerks are building a system that will turn any
body of water into a Yeerk pool, we have to do everything we can to stop
them."

I groaned. I can usually count on Cassie to be rational.

"Okay," I said. "I'll be there, but I promise to complain the entire time."

"Do we need to take a formal vote?" Jake asked.

"No way am I going to miss out on this," Rachel said.

Big surprise there.

"No, no, no votes," I said. "Jake decides. Then if it goes bad we can
all blame him."

19 "I'm there," Tobias said. "But aren't we overlooking a key detail?"

"What's that?" said Jake.

"I mean, it's not a problem for me. But you guys can't just disappear
for a few days. This place could be in, I don't know, Nepal for all we
know."

"Nepal?" I echoed.

"That is a bit of a problem," Jake said.

"Perhaps I can provide a solution," Erek replied.

I held up my hand again. "Is it okay if I say 'uh-oh' again?"

20 "I mean, I just know I'm going to come back to a closet full of soggy
comics," I said. "I can tell by the look in Erek's eyes he's a bathtub
reader."

Erek's solution had been to have himself and three of his Chee friends
program their holograms to look like each of us. Little did my dad know
that he'd be sharing his cornflakes with an android who'd been on Earth
since before the first flake was created.

It was the next morning and we were all in our various bird-of-prey
morphs - Tobias as red-tailed hawk, Jake in his peregrine falcon morph,
Rachel in bald eagle morph, Cassie and me in our osprey morphs, and Ax
in his northern harrier morph - flying toward certain doom.

21 Again.

We were on our way to Visser Three's newest secret feeding pasture. Erek
had given us directions and wished us luck. "Good luck taking on the
most dangerous creature in the galaxy. I gotta go oil my elbow joints.
Let me know if you survive, we'll get together, do lunch. Ciao."

Okay, maybe that's not exactly what he said. But it's okay to resent a
person who's going to be safe while you're going to be screaming and
running for your life. Don't you think?

I've mentioned that I complain occasionally. Or constantly. Sorry, but
any smart person knows there's plenty to complain about in life. And
there are definitely a lot of things to complain about when it comes to
being an Animorph.

However, flying is not one of them.

I mean, talk about fun! Talk about freedom! It's everything you've
imagined and more.

We were following a highway out of town toward the forest that
surrounded some nearby mountains. It was an absolutely perfect day for
flying - sunny, warm, and so clear you could see for miles. The surface
of the highway absorbed the sun's warmth, creating some really nice
thermals, which are pockets of rising warm air.

We were spread pretty far apart. In the animal kingdom, birds of prey
just don't hang together. Each of us took turns flying over the highway,

22 catching a thermal and letting it lift us in the air like an
invisible elevator. Then we'd coast for a while, slowly drifting
downward in the direction we wanted to go. We hardly had to flap our
wings at all.

"Hey, guys, I think I found it," Tobias called out. "See that clearing
in the middle of those trees?"

I scanned my super osprey eyes ahead, toward the line of trees half a
mile off the road. Sure enough, just beyond was a big meadow, maybe
about two blocks wide. And galloping around in that meadow was a
blue-furred, four-eyed, scorpion-tailed Andalite. He looked like he
could have been Ax's father.

He wasn't. He was the leader of the Yeerk invasion of Earth. The only
Yeerk ever to have gotten control of an Andalite body - and of the
Andalite morphing technology. The only Yeerk who can morph.

Visser Three.

Remember I told you about Ax's brother, Elfangor? The Andalite who gave
us our powers? Well, the Visser didn't just murder him.

He ate him.

Visser Three morphed into some bizarre, giant alien and chomped him down
like a piece of sushi. I saw it happen. We all did.

23 Now you know why I have an incredible urge to pee on myself whenever
we come near this guy.

The Visser wasn't alone in his meadow. Despite his fearsome power, the
Visser is never without a few bodyguards. We counted half a dozen
human-Controllers disguised as state cops. And in the tree line lurked a
pair of Hork-Bajir, the bladed shock troops of the Yeerk Empire.

"Okay," Jake said. "Each of us is going to land in those trees, one at a
time at least a thousand feet apart, in at least five-minute intervals.
Rachel, you go first, then Cassie. Each of you keep an eye on those who
land after you, so you can find them as easily as possible once you
remorph. Tobias, you're last. Stay up top and keep a lookout until we've
all landed."

"Let's do it," said Rachel.

I sighed. "The three words I hate most."

24 I spilled the air from my wings and slipped through the trees. I
landed silently on the ground, my laser-focus eyes locked on Visser
Three all the way. If he showed any signs of noticing any one of us
landing, we were going to take off without a second thought. That was
the plan.

The Visser trotted through the grass, feeding through his hooves like
any ordinary Andalite would do. The Hork-Bajir and human-Controllers
looked outward, like Secret Service agents around the President.

I watched him closely to see if he noticed as we came in for our
staggered landings. Nothing unusual. No sign his guards had seen us.

25 I flitted through the tree branches. Stopping, flying, stopping
again. Till I was just a hundred feet or so from the Visser. Then I
dropped to the ground, found cover behind a huge elm tree, and began to
demorph.

Even though I've done it dozens of times now, morphing never fails to
freak me out. I mean, talk about unnatural. It doesn't hurt, but it's
still just creepy.

An itchiness washed over me as my feathers turned soft and ran together,
transforming themselves back into skin. My wings, now pale flesh like a
plucked chicken's, began to shrink and disappear into my shoulder
blades. I could feel the bones in my legs creaking as they stretched out
to their normal length and grew heavy.

SPLOOT! Suddenly, fingers. I could feel them twitching, but they were
attached to my shoulders! Ugh. My arms sprouted out of my torso like
plants growing out of the ground in time-lapse photography, pushing the
fingers and hands out before them, reaching their usual length in a few
seconds.

I was fully human now, dressed in ugly black cycling pants and a tight,
white T-shirt. We've never figured out how to morph clothes, other than
skintight stuff. Forget shoes. It's probably not even possible.
Andalites invented morphing

26 technology. And since they don't wear clothes, morphing "artificial
skin," as Ax says, isn't an issue for them.

I crouched there in the dirt for a few minutes, catching my breath
before morphing again. This morph was nowhere near as fun as an osprey.
In fact, it was downright gross.

I concentrated. I envisioned myself as a fly.

SCHLOOP! My arms and legs shriveled back into my body with a sound like
the one you make when you suck a spaghetti noodle into your mouth. Good
thing I was crouching when I'd started or I'd have crashed to the ground.

Very annoying. No legs or arms. Unfortunately, every morph is different
every time. You never know exactly how things will happen.

Then I began to shrink. The trees around me became taller and taller as
I became tinier and tinier. The leaves on the ground next to me looked
as big as parking lots. I was fly-size now, but my body was still more
human than insect.

I was not an attractive creature right then. Marian would not have asked
me out.

My limbless torso began to divide itself into three parts. Six tiny,
hairy legs shot out of my sides. An itchy spot on my back suddenly
sprouted tiny gossamer wings.

All that remained of the morph was the part I dreaded most. Suddenly my
two eyes began to

27 pop. The two eyes became four. Then sixteen. Then two hundred
fifty-six. And so on. I saw the world through thousands of tiny, fuzzy
TV screens, facing in all directions. Compound eyes. A long tube
sprouted out of my face, a proboscis that flies use to cover their
garbage with saliva before they chow down.

If I morph to fly a million more times, I will never get over the sheer
grossness of it.

We wasted about half an hour hooking up together. Six flies with senses
designed to find dog poop. Not easy, but we eventually assembled into a
sort of hideous squadron.

We took off. A nervous, disgruntled, testy little squadron of flies on a
mission to intercept the cruelest creature on Earth.

Just another fun day of being an Animorph.

28 "How long until the Visser's dust-off flight arrives?" Jake asked Ax.

"Five of your minutes," Ax said. One of the many nice things about
having Ax around is that he has a sort of built-in clock that allows him
to keep track of the time.

On the other hand ... "Ax, I really think you can just deal with the
fact that they aren't our minutes. They are everyone's minutes."

Ax ignored me.

"Let's get this over with," Rachel replied.

"Okay," Jake said. "Remember, if anything goes wrong, don't look back.
Get out of there as fast as you can. Ax? What's the best way to sneak up
on an Andalite?"

29 "From beneath."

"Okay, you heard him," Jake said. "We buzz the grass, try to intersect
him, come up beneath him, grab some Andalite stomach fur. Any questions?"

"Nah, why would there be questions?" I said. "I mean, it's all so simple
and easy and normal. What could possibly go wrong?"

"Was that an example of human sarcasm?" Ax asked.

"Ax, it's sarcasm for anyone, not just for humans."

"Let's get this over with," Tobias grumbled. "Lousy fly eyes. I hate this."

We kept low, down where a fly likes to fly. Down low where it can smell
the rotting food and the animal feces and other wonderful, tasty things.

We skimmed the wild grass tops. It was like flying at treetop level
except that these trees were impossibly tall, willowy stalks that bent
with every chance breeze.

We buzzed our crazy fly wings and bobbled and weaved and wallowed toward
a vague blob of blue fur and bad attitude. Visser Three was still
running, but slowing down. He was moving at an angle from us. We'd
intersect in a very few minutes. Less, if he ...

Turned!

30 "Yah! There he is!" Cassie yelped. "Quick, or we lose him!"

I cut a wild turn. A pair of flies zipped in front of me. Impossible to
tell who. The chase was on!

Galumph, galumph, galumph. The Visser trotted, pursued by six panicked
flies.

"Stay low!" Jake reminded us. "Go for the belly!"

A wall of blue fur galloped right across my line of flight. I saw two
flies zip down and under the heaving curve and disappear from my limited
sight. Then two more flies from out of nowhere.

My turn.

I shot through the air. Visser Three loomed straight ahead but I
couldn't see clearly enough to tell whether his stalk eyes were looking
in my direction. I focused on his stomach and made a beeline for it.

Six inches away! I did the fly somersault, a midair Shannon Miller kind
of thing that brought my legs up and wings down, vectoring in like a
wobbly rocket.

Two inches to touchdown! NO! He cut a sharp right and veered away.

I shot toward him again, but now he bolted to the left. "What's with
him, is he drunk?" I demanded in outrage.

"Aren't you on board, Marco? Everyone else is here," Jake said.

31 "No, we're playing catch. Ahh!"

He'd stopped suddenly. A hand the size of Colorado reached around,
trying to grab me! I slammed into reverse, spun in midair, and zipped
away. Only then did I realize the true target of Visser Three's hand.

He was scratching his butt.

"Marco?" A thought-spoken whisper. Jake. "Are you here?"

Suddenly, it got very dark.

A big black shadow, blocking out the sun. Something straight out of a
science fiction movie.

A Bug fighter. They're called that for a reason. They look like a big,
black cockroach. A roach the size of a school bus, with two long
pincerlike things sticking straight out, like antennae with heavy starch.

The Bug fighter slowly lowered until it touched the ground. I froze.
Visser Three froze. A doorway - or at least a rectangle of relative
darkness - appeared in its side.

The big blue blob in front of me trotted inside.

I followed him.

Inside it was dark. A few lines of light along what was probably the
ceiling and floor. An occasional box of light, probably display
monitors. The air pressure around me suddenly changed as

32 the entrance closed. I maintained and kept my eyes on the Visser.

"Marco? Are you here?" Jake asked again.

"Attempting rendezvous now, Houston. Ten seconds to contact."

Visser Three came to a halt. I dove for his underbelly. Just as I felt
his fur under my feelers, my brain exploded with the sound of very loud
thought-speak.

"Is the Blade ship ready?" Visser Three never whispers.

Something answered. A Taxxon? They're smarter than Hork-Bajir. Weirder,
too. They eat their own.

But I couldn't see anything but giant blue stalks of fur. On the floor
of this jungle was warm, pinkish-khaki skin. I didn't want to touch that
skin. I grabbed a few blue stalks and clung.

"Ax, what was that Taxxon saying?" Jake asked.

"I believe he was stating estimated departure and arrival times."

"And?" Jake asked.

"And I am afraid we have a problem, Prince Jake," Ax said.

My fly stomach bounced. Then it bounced again. I clung tighter to the
Visser's fur. We were taking off and I was fighting the fly's panic
reaction: Things vibrating means MOVE!

33 "What's the problem, Ax?" Jake asked.

"I am afraid our journey is going to be a long one."

"How long?" I asked.

"Approximately three and a half of your Earth hours."

"Uh-oh," I heard Cassie reply.

"Oh, man!" Tobias said.

"You're kidding me," Rachel said.

The reason we weren't happy to hear this news, of course, is that it
meant we were going to have to demorph at some point in flight.
Somewhere aboard a ship occupied by Taxxons and Hork-Bajir and Visser
Three.

34 "Three and a half of our hours! Where are we going, the moon?" Tobias
asked.

"Don't you start with the our-hour-your-hour thing, Tobias," I warned.

"No," Ax replied. "Going to the moon would take less than three and a
half of your hours. Our journey will take longer because we will be
flying through the planet's atmosphere."

"Any idea of our destination?" Jake asked.

"The navigator did not say. I will, however, do my best to gauge our
direction as we go along."

"Ax, you'd have made a great Cub Scout."

"A what?"

"What are we going to do?" Cassie asked.

Good question. We were trapped on a Bug

35 fighter with our worst enemy. And now we had the choice of revealing
our presence - suicidal - or spending the rest of our lives as
garbage-eating insects.

BOOOOM!

"What was that?!" Rachel cried. "Man, this fly does not want to sit still."

"I think we are docking with the Blade ship," Ax replied.

If a Bug fighter is like a bus, a Blade ship is like a jumbo jet. It's
shaped like a battle-ax from the Middle Ages. And it's Visser Three's
personal ship.

"This might actually be a good thing," Jake said. "At least the Blade
ship is big enough so we might find someplace to hide and demorph. No
way we could demorph on the Bug fighter without being seen."

"Have I mentioned that I hate this morph?" Tobias added. "I mean, I'm
finding myself very attracted to the Visser's sweat. How sick is that?"

"Yeah," Cassie agreed. "He stinks. But to my fly brain, he actually
smells kind of good."

"He certainly does not stink," Ax said defensively. "This is an Andalite
body, and Andalites have never been known to stink."

Suddenly the air pressure changed, ever so slightly. Just enough to make
me lose control. I

36 started to fly, then canceled that order and ended up zooming back
hard into the Visser's belly.

"Oops," I said.

"Oops what?" Jake said tensely.

"Oops, he may have felt that." I glued my wings down and managed to calm
the jumpy fly brain just as six gigantic blue columns crashed down
around me, digging across the skin and through the fur like massive plows.

"Oh, man, I'm being scratched!" I cried.

"Cursed parasites!" Visser Three shouted.

"Hey, he's one to talk," Rachel said.

"Heads up, everybody," Jake said. "Be ready to jump at any second!"

The first scratch missed me. As I tried to avoid the Visser's searching
fingers, I jumped from palm-tree-sized hair to palm-tree-sized hair with
blazing speed, like Tarzan after a gallon of Mountain Dew.

"Marco, stay still!" Jake shouted.

"That's easy for you to say!" I shouted back.

Suddenly the fingers stopped raking and formed a cage around me. Trapped!

"I'm about to get pinched!"

"Marco!" Cassie cried.

I felt a slight breeze wash over me. The kind of minuscule air movement
only a fly notices. Then I felt a new vibration. Dozens of tiny impacts:
the needle-sharp legs of a Taxxon.

37 "He's welcoming the Visser back aboard the Blade ship," Ax
translated. "Or he may be telling him his brother is a meteor fragment.
I understand Galard, but this morph's hearing is very uncertain."

The Visser took his hand from his belly. The telephone pole fingers
withdrew.

"Are all the Venber on board?" Visser Three growled.

"Venber?" Ax asked excitedly. "He did say Venber, did he not?"

"I don't know," Jake replied. "Is that important?"

"Hey, Ax. You're not holding out on us, are you?"

"I must have misunderstood," Ax said, not exactly answering my question.

"Excellent," the Visser replied. "With twice as many Venber, our project
will be completed in half the time."

"Well, at least he knows his math," Tobias said wryly.

And that was it for the better part of an hour. They say combat is
ninety-nine percent waiting around and one percent sheer terror. They're
right. We hung out upside down, clinging to Visser Three's stomach hair,
and tried not to let ourselves be overcome by the unholy, screaming willies.

38 I mean, it's one thing being a fly when you're busy. But just hanging
out, you start to notice the spit dribbling off the end of your
proboscis. And that's not good.

"So," I said, "did anyone bring a deck of cards? Anyone seen a good
movie lately? Anyone have any juicy confessions they'd like to make?"

We were in what must have been the Visser's private quarters. A spare
room with no furniture except for a computer console. After all, he was
in an Andalite body, and Andalites don't sit.

There were various things hanging from the walls, like art. Some were
large and elaborate, made of steel or something like steel. Some had
electrical probes. Some had teeth or spikes or saws. We had an idea they
might be instruments of torture collected from around the galaxy.

We had that idea because I recognized one of the artworks: It's called
an "iron maiden." Not the dinosaur rock band, the Middle-Ages cage with
the spikes inside.

It was a little depressing to realize that some Earth museum had
unwillingly made a contribution on behalf of Homo Sapiens.

And it was even more depressing realizing that we were going up against
a guy who thought you should hang an iron maiden on the wall instead of
a Baywatch poster.

39 He'd cleverly come up with two plans. Plan A involved Visser Three
leaving the room voluntarily while the rest of us stayed behind and did
a quick demorph followed by a remorph. But as time passed and the Visser
made no move to leave, it looked more and more like we were going to
have to implement the much riskier Plan B.

Fine by me. I was ready to do something or go insane. Inactivity makes
for way too much time to think about things like death and destruction
and pain and violence. Inactivity makes for fear.

Another good defense against fear is humor. From my point of view, if
you're not laughing, you're crying. Humor as coping mechanism.

40 Besides, I sort of consider it my job to keep us loose in these
situations. Entertain the troops.

"Say, Rachel, I got a joke for you," I said.

"No you don't," she said.

I ignored the warning. "Two blonds are standing across the river from
one another ..."

"Hey," Tobias interrupted. "Remember, I'm a blond, too. It may be
dirty-blond, but it's

still blond."

"Yeah, for a couple of hours a week," I said. "Anyway, the one blond
calls out to the other blond, "How do I get to the other side?" "

"That is very funny, Marco," Ax said brightly.

"I haven't told the punch line yet, Ax," I replied. "And the blond
across the river calls back to her, "You ARE on the other side!" "

"That does it," Rachel said. "Time for Plan B."

"I've heard that one before," Tobias said, unimpressed.

"I am afraid I do not understand," Ax replied.

"Tobias, where exactly did you hear that joke before?" I demanded. "A
sparrow, an owl, and you, hanging out and swapping stories?"

"Ax, do you have any idea where we are?" Jake asked.

"I believe we are heading north."

"Still north?" Jake replied. "How much longer until we have to demorph?"

"About twenty minutes," Ax replied. "of your

41 minutes," he added, with what I swear was deliberate provocation.

"Good plan. Let's do something, anything." Rachel. Of course.

"Yeah. Guess we should," Jake said without much enthusiasm. "Ax, are you
ready?"

"I believe so, Prince Jake."

"Break a leg, Ax-man," I said.

"Whose leg?"

"It's just a ... never mind."

Everything was quiet for a few seconds. Then our brains were bombarded
with the sound of very loud thought-speak.

"Guard! Come in here immediately!" Ax bellowed. A pretty decent
imitation of Visser Three.

I sensed a breeze filled with the scent of a Hork-Bajir warrior.

Visser Three's sudden, startled movement felt like a massive earthquake.
I clung tightly to my chosen hairs.

"What are you doing, fool?!" Visser Three shouted at the Hork-Bajir.
"What is the meaning of this interruption?!"

The Hork-Bajir muttered.

"Get out!" the Visser raged. "Get out or I'll feed you to the Taxxons!"

The guard left.

"Again, Ax," Jake said.

Ax bellowed.

42 Another breeze. I smelled a different Hork-Bajir. I could feel Visser
Three quaking with rage.

"What?!" he screamed. It was like being in a front row seat at a Beastie
Boys concert. Right by the big speakers. I thought my head was going to
explode.

A sudden muscle spasm. I knew right then that the Visser had snapped his
deadly tail. Seconds later ...

WHUMPF!

Something big hit the floor. I didn't want to think about what it was.
Who it was.

"Once more ought to do it, Ax," Jake said. I could sense his hesitation.

I almost felt sorry for the Hork-Bajir. They're just helpless slaves of
the Yeerks. Whatever they do is at the command of the evil Yeerks in
their brains. In fact, before the Yeerks conquered them, the Hork-Bajir
were a peaceful race. They're just big, dumb, bark-eating lizards. And
kind of sweet, really.

Innocent victims in a war that didn't seem to have any other kind.

Ax shouted a third time and I whiffed two Hork-Bajir entering. I guess
they thought two at once would help.

It didn't.

The Visser lunged, out of control with rage. Toward the two Hork-Bajir,
toward the door. Out!

43 "Everybody off!" Jake yelled. "Stay low!"

I let go and shot through the air. I watched as the huge blue blob
disappeared through the doorway. The door shut behind him.

"Demorph and remorph as fast as you can!" Jake instructed.

I landed on the floor and immediately began to demorph.

Morphing's never logical. It never happens the same way twice.

This time, the first thing that changed were my eyes. Thousands of them
went POP. Just like that, I had my human eyes again.

This was not necessarily a good thing, since it gave me the chance to
watch everybody - including myself - demorph. And it gave me a real good
view of the poor Hork-Bajir on the floor. At least he was in one piece.
He might still live. Hork-Bajir are a sturdy bunch. Yeah, he might live.

If the Taxxons didn't find him first.

44 Rachel's change was especially weird. At first, she just grew. Before
my eyes she went from being a little speck to a five-foot-tall,
thousand-eyeballed insect, with blond hair sprouting from the back of
her head.

Cassie has a talent for morphing. She does it better than any of us,
even Ax. In a few seconds, she looked totally normal - except for the
two gossamer wings attached to her back. She looked like an angel or a
fairy godmother.

I looked at my hands. They were hairy claws, gigantic versions of a
fly's leg. I watched as the thick hairs disappeared, replaced by my own
body hair. The ends of the claws cracked open

45 like eggshells. My fingers slowly slithered out, like five baby
snakes emerging from their shells.

"Everybody take about two deep breaths and remorph," Jake whispered when
we all were completely demorphed. Four humans, one red-tailed hawk, and
one young Andalite.

Easier said than done. Morphing is like running a two-hundred-yard dash
at top speed. You're not ready to collapse afterward, but you're not
ready to do it again right away, either.

I took a few deep breaths and concentrated on becoming a fly. I imagined
those thousand eyes and those hairy legs. That disgusting proboscis.

Jake was already changing, getting smaller and smaller. Rachel's arms
began to shrink and grow black hairs. Cassie's wings were sprouting.
Tobias's intense hawk eyes began to double, triple, quadruple, while his
hooked beak grew outward, transforming itself into a tube.

Ax and I seemed to be behind everybody else. Then we heard a faint
hissing. We exchanged worried glances before turning our eyes toward the
door.

The door slid open.

The unconscious Hork-Bajir's luck had just run out.

Taxxon! A tree-trunk-thick centipede with

46 needle legs and weak claws and a red-rimmed mouth and raspberry
Jell-O eyes.

It saw me, only half-morphed. It was puzzled.

Then it saw Ax. An Andalite. No longer puzzled. Terrified! The Taxxon
hasn't been born who can confront an Andalite.

"Ax!" Jake shouted. "Pretend you're Visser Three!"

"What is the meaning of this interruption?!" Ax shouted.

The Taxxon didn't reply. He wasn't fooled. He was motoring back out the
door. And that couldn't happen.

Just then my human eyes became compound fly eyes. I didn't see Ax's tail
snap through the air like a bullwhip.

I heard fwapp.

A soft impact sound followed, like someone had dropped oatmeal on the floor.

An extremely foul smell filled the room. I knew that smell.

"I think we are in trouble, Prince Jake," Ax said.

"Is it dead?" Jake replied.

"In a manner of speaking," Ax continued. "One half of it is consuming
the other half."

Taxxons are the universe's most dedicated cannibals. They don't just eat
other Taxxons. They even eat themselves, given the chance.

47 Hunger defines their world. In death, the Taxxon was acting out of
some awful instinct.

"Ax," Jake said, in his very calm, no-one-freak-yet voice. "Finish
morphing to fly and let's get out of here. Everybody stick close
together. Hug the ceilings. Follow me. C'mon!"

We shot out of the room into a long hallway. The walls and ceiling of
the corridor were black. The floor seemed to be an illuminated path.
Four thin tubes of solid light hung where the ceiling met the wall.

"Ax, what are these lights along the ceiling?" Jake asked.

"Each color designates the path to a certain portion of the ship. For
example, on Andalite ships, following a green line will take you to the
control room. A red line will take you to the engine room."

"Do you think these light lines function in the same way?" I asked.

"It is likely. Everything the Yeerks have they stole from us. However,
my fly vision cannot distinguish the colors of these various lines of
light."

"What would be the quietest part of the ship, Ax?" Cassie asked.

"Storage bays. They are most likely aft."

"Can you tell which direction the ship is flying right now?" Jake asked.

48 "The ship is still heading north, Prince Jake."

"So we want to go south. Let's do that."

"Uh, a little warning before we make any turns, please?" I said. "In
this light I can barely see a thing."

"Ditto," Tobias added.

"If we can't see each other," Rachel said, "it's unlikely Visser Three
and his walking wood-chippers are going to see us. I think."

"Think again," Cassie said. "Look who's coming."

A familiar blue blob. A now-familiar aroma.

"Stick to the ceiling," Jake said.

Visser Three trotted right past us.

Right past us and into his room.

Then his voice was exploding in our heads like a nuclear bomb.

"Guards!" A moment's hesitation as he put it all together. Then, "The
Andalite bandits! They are on board!"

The hallway was suddenly filled with the smell of Hork-Bajir.

"Ax, what light path do we follow?" Jake asked.

"I cannot be certain which leads to where. The Yeerk color sense may - "

"JUST PICK ONE!" Jake roared.

"Follow me," Ax said meekly.

49 Jake almost never yells. When he does, you have to know it's time to
do what he says.

There were four lines of lights, and all of them looked the same hazy
gray-green to me. To all of us. But Ax picked one.

"Get the Andalites!" the Visser screamed in an absolute frenzy of rage
and excitement. "Here! On my own Blade ship! Ah-hah! I will slowly kill
the fool who fails me! Do you hear me? Get them! Get them! GET THEM!"

We blew out of there as fast as our little fairy wings would take us. We
chased that ribbon of light, hoping it wasn't leading us into an even
uglier death trap.

50 Ax found the storage bays and led us there like he'd been born and
raised on that Blade ship.

"They know about insect morphs," Cassie said. "We're vulnerable. They
could flood the ship with insecticides."

"I'm not dying as a fly," Rachel said. "They want me, I'm taking some of
them down with me."

She was already demorphing. And as far as I could see, she was right:
Forget dying as a bug. If the Yeerks were going to catch us, it wasn't
going to be with a can of Raid.

51 We were about as trapped as we could get. Visser Three knew we were
on his ship. It was only a matter of time. And as far as this battle was
concerned, the Yeerks owned time.

In our normal bodies again we could see how scared we were. I could see
the way Jake was gritting his teeth, Rachel's mean grin, Cassie's worry,
tinged with sadness. It would almost have been better to remain in
morph. In morph you could hear the fear, but you didn't have to look it
in the eyes.

I was watching Rachel, trying to decide for the millionth time whether
she was brave or just insane, when I happened to focus past her.

Rising up behind her was a pillar of glass. A cylinder ten feet, twelve
feet tall, and half as broad. Inside the cylinder was a vague shape,
blood-red and midnight-blue slashes highlighting a glistening silver body.

Yes, body. Because despite the frosted glass and the mist that filled
the cylinder, that ten-foot-tall tube contained something biological.
There was a row of the cylinders spaced across the cargo bay. Maybe ten
in all.

"They look like creatures of some kind," Cassie said.

I could feel the cold emanating from the cylinders. I reached out to
touch one, but my

52 fingertips went numb before they'd gotten within an inch of the surface.

"Okay, this is a totally unnecessary new weirdness," I said.

"They look almost like ..." Ax began.

"Like what?" I demanded.

"I was going to say they look like the Venber Visser Three mentioned,"
Ax said. "But they cannot be ..."

"What's a Venber?" Rachel asked.

"An alien race from a frozen moon several dozen light-years from here,"
Ax explained. "We learned about them in school. They were among the
earliest evidence we obtained of life beyond our own planet. But the
Venber have been extinct for thousands of years."

"Yeah, well, speaking of extinct," I said, "we'd better get morphed or
we're gonna end up the same way."

Cassie was trying to peer through the mist, struggling to get a closer
look at the big, silver creatures. "What would Visser Three want with
some extinct aliens? What do you know about these guys, Ax?"

"They never got beyond primitive tool use, though they may have had the
intelligence to evolve further. Had they survived. They lived in very
cold conditions - two hundred of your degrees below zero."

53 "Now they're our degrees, too?" I muttered. "Hey, here's something to
think about: The bad guys could be here any minute. Any one of our
minutes. Do we want to spend the last few minutes of our lives talking
about extinct alien Popsicles?"

I must have sounded a bit hysterical. Jake actually smiled. "Marco's
right. Get ready."

Suddenly Ax looked alert, like he was listening to far-off music. "We
are descending. Possibly preparing for a landing."

"Fine, whatever, let's morph," Jake said.

Descending? I wondered. Preparing to land? Why would Visser Three let
the ship land? If he landed, we could conceivably escape.

A mistake?

I shook off the worry. I had enough worries already.

Minutes later, we were as ready as we were going to get. Jake was in
tiger morph; Rachel was a grizzly bear; Cassie was a wolf; and Tobias
and Ax were their own handsome selves. Me, I went gorilla.

Together we were a tough, deadly fighting team. And then ...

Shwooof! To our left a door opened.

Shwooof! To our right a door opened.

Shwooof! The door opened right ahead of us.

Each door was big enough to frame a dozen

54 Hork-Bajir. Peering over their shoulders were more HorkBajir.

And right then I realized why Visser Three had let the ship land: He'd
located us. He knew he had us. And we were definitely dead.

55 I stopped breathing. Hork-Bajir were everywhere. Everywhere!

This wouldn't be a fight. This would be a slaughter.

Then, at the center door, he appeared.

"Well, well, well. Here aboard my own ship. How nice of you to come
around to see me. Can I offer you anything? Something to drink? To eat?
Or maybe just a quick death?"

The Visser laughed. He had reason to laugh. Three doors open and filled
with Dracon-armed Hork-Bajir.

"Give the word, Jake," Rachel whispered. "Give the word and I swear I
can at least get him."

56 Three doors? Wasn't there a fourth door? And why wasn't it open?

"Ax!" I said urgently. "I don't want to turn around and look, but is
there a fourth door?"

Ax swiveled one stalk eye. "Yes! It must lead to the exterior of the
ship. But there is a control pad protecting the emergency manual
release. It is undoubtedly coded. It would take me hours to find the
security code."

Of course. And Visser Three knew that. But maybe this wasn't a case for
subtlety. I flexed my canned ham fist. "Jake! There's another door
behind us. A keypad. Maybe I can break it open."

"And get fried before you twitch," Jake pointed out.

"No. The Yeerks will not fire weapons in here. Not with those
canisters," Ax said. "They are obviously valuable specimens."

Jake reached a very fast decision. "Rachel. Next word Visser Three says,
you slam the nearest canister. Marco? The keypad. Ax, back up Marco.
Tobias, Cassie, and me, straight at Visser Three, a feint."

I was getting ready to make a lame pun about "feint" and "faint" when
the Visser spoke.

"Surrender now and -"

Before he could get to his fourth word, Rachel

57 struck! A mountain of grizzly slammed hard into the nearest cylinder.

WHAM!

Nothing!

Too late, I'd already spun around and bounded toward the keypad.

"KILL THEM!" Visser Three screamed.

"Tseeeeer!" Tobias screamed.

"Hraawwwrrr!" Rachel bellowed. She slammed all her weight this time, all
her strength.

Crack!

A single crack, a small, pathetic crack, appeared in the cylinder wall.
The mist began to seep out.

Jake, Cassie, and Tobias attacked. No other option now.

I saw a flash of orange and black leaping straight at Visser Three. No
less than half a dozen Hork-Bajir enveloped him, blades flashing.

I saw the keypad. I drew back my pile-driver arm and slammed it with all
my might. It crumpled like a tin can.

"Rip away the metal!" Ax yelled, even as he used his reversed stalk eyes
to aim a sonic-boom tail snap at a rushing Hork-Bajir.

Rachel withdrew, backed up a dozen feet, and ran all out, full speed, on
all fours at the

58 cylinder. A small army of Hork-Bajir leaped after her.

Just then, I saw Cassie flying through the air. Not a leap. She'd been
thrown, bloodied and broken.

Tobias was in the air, harassing Visser Three, aiming for his vulnerable
stalk eyes.

WHAM!

Rachel hit the cylinder. A flailing mob of Hork-Bajir literally covered her.

And then the cylinder shattered.

CRASH! It fell in pieces.

Whoosh! The mist inside billowed out. Hork-Bajir screamed and tried to
back away. But too late! The clouds of mist caught them, freezing any
body part it touched.

Not freezing, as in it made them cold. Freezing, as in solid. Like stone
gargoyles. I saw one puzzled Hork-Bajir gape in horror as his left leg
simply broke off and lay on the deck like a piece of a statue.

The mist hit Rachel, too. But she had a thick coat of fur. The fur froze
and shattered off like thousands of brittle needles.

I ripped away the loose metal of the keypad.

"Squeeze that handle!" Ax ordered.

I squeezed.

Too late, Visser Three saw his mistake.

59 "Bridge!" he roared. "Bridge, get us up! Get us up!"

The outer hull door began to slide. It opened onto empty whiteness.

"Jake! Cassie! Everyone! Door open! Bail!" I yelled.

The freezing mist was swirling around the floor now, forcing the Visser
to back up. But that didn't mean he wouldn't send his troops into it.

"After them! After them!"

Hork-Bajir plowed through the mist and found themselves on frozen feet.
Feet with toes that broke off, with ankles that snapped.

Jake coiled his tiger muscles and took the mist at a leap. Tobias was
first out the door. Cassie lay unconscious in a heap, with mist
advancing on her.

Without hesitation, Rachel walked into the mist and lifted Cassie's wolf
body with her teeth. The grizzly's left foot stayed where it had frozen.
Rachel staggered to the door on a stump.

One by one, we tumbled out of the door and into emptiness.

60 We landed about twenty feet below in a pile of fur, claws, wings, and
hooves. I hit hard, facedown. I was under hundreds of pounds of morphed
humans and one alien.

There was a huge whoosh. The Blade ship, following Visser Three's orders
and going for altitude. Bad timing. I could practically hear him
screaming, "No, no! Down! Down!"

I scratched at the ground and tried to pull myself out of the squirming
pile. But the ground was slippery.

Ice. I could feel the black, leathery skin on my chest burning against it.

Just a few inches from my face, I could see Jake's claws scraping at the
ice.

61 I tried to push away, to get out from under the grizzly bear lying
over me. But not even my strength could move Rachel till she rolled
away. I tried to stand up.

I felt my skin tearing as I pulled away from the ice.

"Ow ow ow ow!" I screamed.

But then I saw Rachel's foot. Or at least the stump where the foot had
been. She was demorphing as fast as she could. Grizzlies can take a lot
of pain. But nothing likes losing an entire foot.

Cassie was reviving, turning her wolf snout back and forth like a person
having a bad dream. Then, "Yah! Oh! Oh, man! Wh-where are we?"

"Someplace cold," I said. "Really cold. You better demorph and remorph,
fast!" I could see the Blade ship. It had shot into the air, up through
the clouds, and was still hauling away. But it would be back.

"Marco's right," Jake said. "Jeez! Is it cold enough?"

My arms were already starting to lose their mobility. It was intensely,
horribly cold. The still-warm blood on my chest gave off a steamy mist
in the frosty air.

I was a jungle creature. Big and furry, but not really adapted for
anything less than hot and

62 sticky. And we were a long way from hot and sticky.

Cassie was human again, standing barefoot on ice. "Th-th-think I'll
re-m-m-morph," she chattered. Rachel wasn't far behind her.

"What is this, Alaska?" she demanded, steam escaping from between her
lips. As out of place as we all were, no one looked more out of place
than Rachel in human form.

"Could be Alaska," Tobias said. "About a mile that way I see some kind
of base or even a town. Lots of gray, corrugated metal buildings. One
bigger than the rest. Big doors like those on plane hangars. There's
like this giant bowl attached to the roof. And that's the hawk report,
boys and girls. I am morphing before I end up in the frozen foods
section next to the frozen chicken."

"That settles it," I said. "it ain't Hawaii."

I couldn't see the base in any detail. Just a vague outline in the
distance. But to my right was an endless body of half-frozen water, a
jigsaw puzzle in ice. On our left, a hundred yards from the shore, was a
huge outcropping of craggy rocks, the foot of an enormous mountain range
that swept up and away into the distance. No trees, no grass. Just a
ridge of black rock and white snow.

"Not the Caribbean, either," I said, trying to

63 ignore the fact that my big gorilla feet were freezing in place.

"Oh!" Cassie cried. "I've never felt cold like this! I'm a wolf and I'm
cold!"

"Tobias!" Rachel shouted. He had suddenly collapsed. He lay on the ice,
flapping his wings lamely.

"I can't fly ... can't morph ... losing ..."

Rachel scooped him up and tucked him into her chest with hands
half-human and half-bear. She morphed, growing huge around him, all the
while keeping him pressed to her fur.

I slapped my big hands against my arms and rubbed, trying to work
feeling back into my fingers. I looked up and saw the Blade ship, an
ominous black shape against the clouds.

"He is not coming back this way," Ax said. "He will be heading for his
base."

You'd think that would make us feel better. But no one thought for a
minute that he was just going to let us go.

No, he just figured there was no hurry. Unlike us, he knew where we
were. And he knew we weren't going to get far.

64 "We need to get moving," Jake said. His tiger morph was doing fairly
well, I guess. Or else he was just refusing to complain. Which was fine.
I'd complain for both of us.

"Ax?" Cassie asked. "How are you holding up?"

"I am holding nothing up," he said. "But I am slowly freezing to death.
I doubt I can maintain brain function for more than a few more minutes."

"Ax, you really need to tell us these things," Jake said. "Hang in for a
few minutes. We need to move out. We need distance."

I took off as fast as I could, which was pretty

65 slow, considering I could no longer feel my feet. Every gust of wind
felt like a punch in the face. Tears streamed down my cheeks and froze
before they reached my chin. The blood on my chest became a coating of
pinkish ice.

We didn't get far.

Ax stumbled. "Prince Jake! I am not sure I can continue."

"Okay, look, um ... okay, Ax! Tobias!" Jake commanded. "Neither of you
has a good cold-weather morph. Morph to fleas and hide in Rachel's fur!"

"Come on guys," Rachel shouted. "I've got you!"

Rachel stood over Ax while he began to morph. Tobias, still in her arm,
began to shrink. Then Rachel scooped Ax's still-morphing form and held
him to her chest as well.

"Okay, now we move. We need distance, we need cover. Before the Yeerks
can come out after us. Let's go!" Jake said.

We took off again, a staggering, miserable little gang of biological
misfits. A tiger, a bear, a wolf, and a gorilla.

I started giggling. Gorilla! Here in the snow. Funny.

Just tired. That was the thing. Tired.

I looked back up again for the Blade ship.

66 Nothing in the sky. But the cloud above was kind of pretty. Looked
like a horse. No, a unicorn. Yeah. Pretty.

We ran and kept running. Along the frozen shoreline. Beneath the shadow
of the gloomy rocks.

Every step was torture. My feet were numb, but the pain still burned in
my legs. I ran on all my fours, gorilla-style, and my knuckles were soon
raw and bloody.

The wind came in sudden gusts, lashing my face, cutting straight through
my fur. I hated the wind. It made me tired. Couldn't see right.

Just follow the orange kitty, I told myself. Follow the big
orange-and-black kitty.

Take a thousand ice cubes, fill a bathtub with them, and crawl in. You
might get a fraction of an idea what I was feeling.

Now imagine the prick of a very sharp pin. Imagine a solid sheet of pins
slapped against your face. Again and again. That was the wind.

We ran on bloody frozen feet and now I saw rocks looming higher and
higher beside me. Hide. Hide in the rocks. Yeah, that way the ... the
guys ... the ones who were chasing us, wouldn't be ...

I realized I was confused. The thoughts jumbling together in my head
weren't making sense. Were they?

67 "Okay, in here!" Jake said. "We can take a break."

In where? Rocks all around us. Tall piles. Like ... like rocks. Yeah.

"I cannot believe how cold it is," Cassie panted, her breath turning to
plumes of steam.

"I can barely feel my paws," Rachel complained.

"What?" I said. "I need to sleep now."

I looked down stupidly at my bare feet. Swollen. Huge. Nearly double
their usual size.

I closed my eyes. Tired. Cold.

"Okay, everybody," Jake said. "We have to figure out what to do. Rachel,
I know you're cold, but can you stand it?"

"For a while," Rachel said. "Not for long. Aren't grizzlies usually
hibernating in a cave somewhere in the winter?"

"Cassie? How about you?"

"Well, wolves are cold-weather animals, but I can't stand weather this
cold. At least not for long."

Not for long.

Voices. Faraway voices.

I dropped to the ground. And then I noticed I was on the ground. I had a
sudden urge to stay there. Sitting on the frozen ground.

"Marco!" Jake yelled. "What are you doing?"

Everything was turning kind of gray.

68 "Marco, you have to keep moving," Rachel shouted.

"What's happening?" Tobias asked from somewhere on Rachel's body.

"He's going into shock," Cassie said, strangely calm.

"Marco!" Rachel yelled. She grabbed me with her big bear paws and shook
me. "You've got to stand up!"

"Stop," I mumbled. Angry. She's always angry.

"Marco, morph out!" Jake yelled at me. "Morph out!"

"Yeah." I tried to nod.

Rachel shook me harder. "Come on, Marco! Don't lose it!"

But I wasn't listening. I didn't care. I was floating through space.

No, not floating. Flying. Just like an osprey. Through empty space.

Wait! A light up ahead. Calling to me. Drawing me to it. Very bright.
Like ... like the lights around the bathroom mirror.

I tried to flap my wings, but I didn't have any. I didn't need them. Not
anymore.

69 "I'm coming," I whispered.

Almost there. Then everything would be perfect.

"Marco!"

"Okay, okay ... oooookay."

WHAM!

Something bashed me in the face. Blinding pain. I felt some teeth drop
onto my tongue.

"Marco! Wake up!"

I opened my eyes. Jake, Cassie, and Rachel were standing over me. Rachel
had blood on her big hairy paw. My blood. From my flat gorilla nose. Now
somewhat flatter. Her paw was raised, ready to smack me again.

70 "Hey, hey, hey!" I yelled, gently touching my crushed face with a
frozen hand. "What is your problem?"

"I'm trying to save your life, you idiot," Rachel said. "Don't know why,
but I am."

"Well, try a kinder, gentler method next time," I whined, spitting out
something that felt an awful lot like bloody teeth.

"We were losing you. You have to demorph, Marco," Jake said. "Then
remorph as a wolf. It's the best morph we've got for this climate.
Rachel, you too, if you think it's best. I'll take Ax and Tobias while
you go first."

"They can stay on me," she said.

"Um, Rachel?" Jake said. "You have to pass through human on the way to
wolf."

"Like we'd see anything?" Tobias said with a laugh. "We're fleas!"

I began to demorph. Slowly at first. Everything very slow. Brain not
thinking too good.

I began to change, shrinking back to my normal size. My frozen, swollen
fingers thinned. My black fur sucked itself back into my body, leaving
me even more vulnerable to the cold.

A few seconds later I was back in my human form, with nothing on but a
pair of black cycling pants and a white T-shirt. Not a good body for the
weather. I morphed swiftly to wolf.

Relief!

71 Not total relief. The wind still sliced through me with its cold
steel edge. But I had fur that was at least designed for fairly cold
weather. And feet that were evolved for something other than padding
around on heat-rotted vegetation.

Cassie demorphed and remorphed as a wolf. Rachel was right with her.
Jake morphed as well. I know he'd suffered in his tiger morph. But Jake,
being Jake, wouldn't complain till everyone else was safe.

"I think this is the best morph we have," Cassie said thoughtfully.
"Unless we get to open water. Then my whale morph would be good. I don't
know about dolphin or shark. I think they're both more warm water.
Still, these wolf bodies are not equipped for the Arctic or Antarctic or
wherever we are. We might be able to survive for a few hours at a time,
long enough to remorph and regenerate, but we're still vulnerable. Too
vulnerable to be fighting."

"Point taken," Jake said. "We stay out of fights, if we can."

I stuck my head out of the alcove to see what was going on back down the
slope. With this slight elevation I could see the base clearly, if not
in detail.

But it wasn't the far-off base that got my attention. There was very
little alive anywhere near us, and thus almost nothing to smell. So when

72 the new scent drifted our way, all our wolf heads perked up.

You probably know how well a dog can smell and hear. Well, a wolf is to
a dog what a Ferrari is to a Hyundai.

Smell! Sound! Sight! All locked on like some computerized targeting system.

"What the heck are those things?" I cried.

There were two of them. About eight feet tall. Humanoid. Torso, head,
and limbs in the usual places. Only their heads were shaped kind of like
a hammerhead shark's, oblong with big, dark globs on each side that must
have been eyes. Each creature had two thick upper arms growing out of
broad shoulders. The upper arms split at the elbows to make two forearms.

Big, burly, nasty-looking beasts. Silver, with flashes of blood-red and
midnight-blue along their flanks, along their shoulders, and converging
in their faces.

I'd seen that color scheme before.

They were sliding toward us on long, ski-like feet. They used two of
their forearms, one right and one left, to propel themselves forward.

And they glistened in the light like diamonds or crystals.

With their third and fourth forearms, each carried a chunky black tube
of some kind.

"Ax, we've got aliens coming," Jake said.

73 "I think they're the ones we saw in those cylinders."

Jake described them.

"I do not believe it," Ax cried. "A perfect description of a Venber."

"Venber? What happened to them being extinct?" I cried.

"Reports of their extinction may have been exaggerated."

"Ax, are you developing a sense of humor? If so, stop it, okay?"

"Well, whatever they are, they're coming this way in a hurry," Rachel
said. "And judging by those big guns in their hands, I don't think
they're welcoming us to the neighborhoods."

"Yeah," Jake said. "Let's get out of here."

The Venber kept coming, making strange, crunching noises. Regular,
repeated sounds that seemed to ricochet off the rocks behind us in a
weird, distorted echo.

Crinch! Crinch!

Sproing! Sproing!

They seemed to know exactly where they were going. Or at least they knew
exactly where we had gone.

"They're echolocating," Cassie said. "Pinging us with those sounds."

"Into the rocks," Jake said. "They can't echolocate in there, can they?"

74 "They should not be able to now," Ax pointed out. "We are already in
the shadow of the rocks. This must be a very sophisticated sense to pick
us out of the clutter. Very impressive."

"Swell, you can ask one out on a date, Ax, you like them so much. Do you
have anything useful to tell us?"

"Yes. They would have difficulty dealing with temperatures above
freezing. Liquid water, for example."

"Well, then we have nothing to worry about. We offer them a vacation in
Florida and we're home free!"

"Marco, why didn't I just let you freeze?" Rachel wondered.

The Venber were about fifty yards away from us when they stopped. Then
they raised those big tubes and pointed them our way.

They didn't look like cameras.

"I'm thinking we should duck," I said.

75 We crouched low, skulking wolves.

TSEEEEEEW! The horizon filled with a blinding green light.

About four tons of rock upslope from us became four tons of gravel.

Ka-BOOOOM!

It was gravel rain! Rock hail.

I've been shot at by Dracon beams before. They're plenty scary. These
things were about ten stages past scary.

"Holy!" Jake yelled. "What are those things?"

"Dracon assault cannons," Ax replied. "They are used for attacking
hardened ground facilities from orbit."

"I am so out of here!" I cried.

76 "Forget the rocks, hug the shoreline," Jake said. "They want a chase,
we'll give them a chase."

We took off along the dead rock and slush shoreline.

The Venber followed. Sliding along on their ski feet, pushing themselves
forward with those massive forearms, they followed. Every few minutes
one of them would stop and take a shot with its assault cannon, blasting
the already lifeless scenery.

"Spread out," Jake said. "One well-aimed shot could kill us all."

We ran and ran down that shoreline. One good thing about being a wolf is
the ability to run for hours without having to stop. A wolf can run all
day and all night.

The Venber kept after us. They were bigger, they were stronger. We were
faster. And they couldn't match our endurance.

But unlike the six of us, the two alien ice monsters didn't have to
demorph every two hours.

"This makes no sense," Ax said as we ran. "The Yeerks could not possibly
infest the Venber. The Yeerks would freeze. They must be controlled by
some other means. Unless, of course, the Yeerks managed to find a method
of keeping

77 themselves from freezing inside the Venber's body."

"Whatever," Rachel said. "Point is, we're out front. I don't even see
them anymore. Maybe they've given up."

I turned to look over my shaggy gray shoulder. I couldn't see the
Venber. Couldn't smell them, either, despite the wind blowing from
behind us.

"No way they gave up," Tobias said. "We have to keep moving."

"So says the flea all nice and warm in his honey's back fur," I muttered.

"What did you say?" Rachel demanded. I guess she was shocked that I'd
dare to make any remark suggesting she and Tobias were more than just
friends and Animorphs. Like that was some big secret.

We slowed our pace a little. My footpads were numb and swollen.
Frostbite. Again. I couldn't feel the tips of my ears.

"We need to find somewhere to demorph and remorph," Jake said. "What's
our time?"

"We have twenty of your minutes left," Ax replied.

I swear he emphasized "your" minutes. We trotted back over to the rocks
that continued to follow the shoreline all the way to eternity.

We ran on till we found a deep, steep-walled

78 alcove. It was still cold as the dark side of the moon. But at least
the wind was left behind to howl and moan impotently.

We huddled around Cassie, trying to keep her warm as she demorphed
first. Then we took turns demorphing and remorphing, huddling together
like a litter of newborn puppies.

Weird. A bunch of wolves pressing flank to flank. It was a strange and
kind of wonderful experience.

It brought back memories I didn't know I had. From when I was very
little. Sitting on the couch with my mom, snuggled up against her,
watching TV and sucking my thumb.

Corny. Probably the cold was getting to me. Or maybe it's just that in
the cold, in an environment that is ready to kill you without thought or
mercy, simple animal warmth, body and body, breath and breath, seems to
touch something deep inside you. Millions of years of Homo Sapiens,
huddled together, body and body against the killing wind.

Until at last humans learned to make fire. Of course, that involved
matches. Or at least stick.

"So now what?" Rachel asked when we'd all remorphed. Ax and Tobias had
remorphed as fleas and were hiding in Jake's fur. I guess my
undiplomatic remark about Tobias and Rachel had made them self-conscious.

"We have to keep moving," Jake said. "I'm

79 sure the Venber are still tracking us. But we also have to find
somewhere to hide for the night. No way we'll survive this cold without
shelter."

"Maybe we can find a cave," Cassie said. "Or a snowdrift and dig a hole
in it for a lair."

"Or a McDonald's," I suggested. "I thought they were everywhere."

"What we really need to do is find some cold-weather animals to morph,"
Rachel added.

"I'll second that motion," Tobias said.

When we were semi-thawed, our frostbite all replaced with healthy flesh
in the new morphing, we moved on. It was getting dark. According to Ax
it was only two o'clock - you know, in our hours. But the sun was
already disappearing. That could only mean it was going to get colder.

80 We trotted along the shoreline in the fading light. Sometimes we ran.
Every once in a while I'd look back in the direction of the Yeerk
station. I couldn't see anything. But now and then I caught a smell that
I was pretty sure I recognized.

Venber. Still hunting us.

The ice along the shore was more solid here. It extended in a lumpy
sheet from about a quarter-mile to several miles from the shore. Beyond
that, the water was thick with chunks of white.

Ax had said that water might be dangerous to the Venber, so we
considered going right out onto the ice and closer to its outer edge. But

81 if we stayed out in the open, the Venber might be better able to
track us with their echolocation.

And out on the ice there was no shelter at all from the terrible wind.
We decided to stay closer to the slope of the ridge beside us. There,
too, we'd be able to find cover in the rocks if it came down to combat.

The sun started to disappear on the horizon, giving the ice an orange
glow. As the sun dropped, the wind shifted direction.

A sudden scent! Like a flashing neon sign to my wolf nostrils. Everyone
caught the scent at the same time. We all stopped.

I sniffed again, concentrating, letting the wolf mind that existed
beside my own provide a rough translation: a scent similar to Rachel's
grizzly bear morph, but not quite the same.

I turned my ears toward the wind, toward the scent. Yes, just barely, I
heard something. A steady, easy, confident gait. Ice and snow crunched
by enormous weight. Four feet.

"Let me guess," I said. "The Abominable Snowman."

"Abominable something," Rachel agreed. "Might be our dinner. Even a wolf
needs to eat."

We quickened our pace and began to turn in a wide arc toward the unseen
creature. Cassie

82 spotted him first as he emerged from the shadow of an ice heave.

"Over there," she said.

My wolf's eyes locked onto a spot of black.

His nose.

Then two black dots above it.

His eyes.

The nose and eyes moved. And in the near darkness, the rest of him began
to take shape. A humongous mass of off-white fur.

"Polar bear!" Cassie said delightedly. "I guess that means we're Arctic
and not Antarctica."

"I did tell you our direction was north," Ax sniffed from down deep in
Jake's fur.

It was weird. This creature you only saw on TV or at the zoo: a polar
bear. Sitting on the ice, scratching himself.

We stood there and stared at him. He stopped scratching and seemed to be
staring back. He sniffed at the air, and then lifted his big bear butt
and started lumbering toward us on four thick legs.

"I'm thinking that this guy is not going to be our dinner," Rachel said.

"Two-to-one odds we end up being his," I agreed. "Let's run away. Fast."

"Uh-huh," Jake said, starting into a trot.

83 "What is this polar bear?" Ax asked from Flea World.

"Polar bear," Cassie said. "The largest land predator in the world."

"What do you mean largest predator?" Rachel protested, as if Cassie had
just insulted her. "I thought grizzly bears were the largest!"

"Grizzlies aren't true predators. Let's face it: You'll eat berries,
given a chance," Cassie answered. "Anyway, polar bears can actually be
heavier, if they've really packed on the blubber. Although grizzlies are
normally built thicker."

"Just how much public television do you watch, Cassie?" I asked. "No, I
really don't want to know."

"I could take him," Rachel muttered. But she didn't sound too sure.

"Predators?" Jake said. "I thought bears just ate fish and berries."

"Not polar bears," Cassie replied, breaking into a full run now. "But
this might actually be good news for us. Where there are predators,
there are prey."

The bear kept after us, lumbering along the ice in a casual way.

"What do polar bears eat?" Jake asked.

"Dumb kids playing hero," I muttered.

84 "Seals, usually," Cassie said. "Other things, too. But mostly seals."

"I haven't seen any seals," I said. We were running at full speed now. I
looked back and saw the bear had slowed down. Apparently, we were not
his main concern.

"Of course you don't see any," Rachel said. "They're hiding from the
polar bear!"

"Now that we're on this topic," Jake said, "what exactly are we supposed
to eat?"

"We could try fishing," I suggested.

"I could use my grizzly morph," Rachel said. "Grizzlies fish, right?"

"I doubt that'll work," Cassie said. "Grizzly bears fish in streams. I
don't think fish come anywhere near the surface in this part of the world."

"Great," I said, "so I guess we just go ahead and starve. Why not?
Everything else is going so well."

Things were looking pretty hopeless: polar bear to the right of us,
Venber behind us, and cold all around. And now it was almost completely
dark. The temperature was beginning to drop from shockingly cold to
hideously cold. And the wind was howling off the water.

"We'd better find somewhere to hide for the night," Jake said.

"I'm just glad the Chee are covering for us back home," Cassie said.

85 Usually Cassie knows the right thing to say. Not this time. The last
thing I wanted to think about right then was my home, my warm home with
my warm bed and my warm TV.

I've been hurled sixty million years into the past, and been trapped on
alien planets, but I'd never felt so far from home.

86 We dug a lair in a snowdrift on top of some rocks looking out over
the ice. And by "lair" I mean a big hole. A big, wet snow hole.

"I get the bedroom with the separate bath," I said. No one laughed.

For what felt like the tenth time that day, we demorphed, one by one. We
shivered in our human bodies for just long enough to turn blue (all
except Ax, who was already blue), then remorphed.

The temperature continued to fall. We heard the ice cracking and
groaning like a never-ending thunderstorm echoing through the darkness.
It was an amazing sound.

You know how they say all the continents used

87 to be one big continent, and that over millions of years they broke
up and drifted apart? That's what it sounded like. The continents
leaving each other behind.

We spent the night huddled together in our makeshift cave, trying to
keep each other from freezing to death. Each of us took turns standing
guard, which basically consisted of sticking a nose out in the frozen
air every couple of minutes to catch wind of anyone or anything dangerous.

Once in a while, I caught a vague, alien scent.

The Venber were still tracking us. But as long as we were hidden
underground, their echolocation would fail to find us.

"Say, Ax," I said some time in the middle of the night. "You sleeping?"

"No, Marco," he replied from somewhere on my chest. He and Tobias had
moved after Jake began complaining of some suspicious itchiness.

"What's the deal with these Venber?" I asked.

"Every Andalite knows the story of the Venber," Ax began. "In fact, the
story of the Venber has much to do with the modern Andalite policies and
methods of interstellar interactions."

"Tell us the story, Ax," Jake said. "Obviously, none of us can sleep.
And we have to demorph soon, anyway. So what do you know about the Venber?"

88 "Just what everyone knows," he said. "I mean, what any Andalite
knows. They were a primitive species with a highly unusual physiology.
Unique, actually. They do not seem to have required radiant energy of
any kind. Obviously they are not carbon-based."

"Obviously," I mocked.

"They were discovered back toward the dawn of Andalite space travel. Not
by us, by some other race. The Five."

"The five what?" Cassie asked.

"No one knows. They just called themselves The Five. No doubt it meant
something to them."

"Maybe they lived between The Four and The Six," I suggested.

"Anyway, The Five discovered the Venber and began to trap and export them."

"Say what?"

"They basically harvested the Venber. It seems that a Venber melts,
burns, in any case becomes liquid at temperatures above freezing. And
the resulting liquid has many uses. Particularly in the creation of
superconductors for the primitive computers of that era."

"But... But these are sentient creatures, aren't they?" Cassie asked.

"Yes," Ax said simply. "They were. The Five extinguished them. They
annihilated a sentient

89 species to speed their computers. The Venber disappeared."

"That's sickening," Cassie said. "That's just evil."

"Yes," Ax agreed. "But if it is any comfort, The Five are no longer in
existence, either. Soon after we encountered them for the first time
they... well, no one knows for certain what happened to The Five. But
Andalites in that era are not the Andalites of today."

There was a long silence after that. You couldn't say there was a chill
in the air since it was already freezing. But our already low spirits
had been plowed under.

"Good bedtime story, Ax," I joked. "If you ever have kids, they're going
to need night-lights. Just one big question: If the Venber are extinct,
why are they trying to kill us?"

"I can only speculate. I suspect that because of temperatures on Venbea,
the Yeerks were able to retrieve some intact genetic material from
Venber corpses."

"So they regrew them?"

"Probably they coupled the Venber DNA with some other species. These
would be a hybrid: part Venber, part something else."

"What else?" Cassie asked.

Ax hesitated. "You would want to use a species with the most complex DNA
structure

90 available. It would make it easier to attach new DNA."

"And what creature would that be?" Tobias asked.

"Of the species available to the Yeerks?" Ax said. "Humans. Those Venber
may be a hybrid of Venber... and humans."

After that we fell silent and stayed that way. We curled up against one
another, four wolves and a pair of fleas, deep in a hole in the snow,
lost in a frozen wilderness, thinking of faraway tragedies on dark,
frozen moons.

I'd have traded my left lung for a fire.

91 Throughout the long, long night we demorphed and remorphed one at a
time, time and again. We were so much more than exhausted.

Ax and Tobias started freaking out after a while. It was amazing they
lasted as long as they did in flea morph. They demorphed and stayed for
a while in their own forms, huddling between the four of us, regaining a
sense of the reality they'd lost as nearly blind, bloodsucking fleas.

It was not a good night. It did not pass easily. I was cold, scared,
hungry, cold, hungry, and also cold. We were without a plan. Without a
clue. As lost as it was possible to be. And more tired than I would have
thought possible.

92 Morphing was probably the only reason we survived that night. After
about an hour, the cold became so severe we thought we were going to
die. The morphing process would bring us back to full health so we could
start freezing to death all over again.

Many hours and many morphs later, the sun began to creep through the
hole of our lair.

I am not known as a morning person, but I was the first to crawl out and
take a look. The temperature had risen. It was probably a balmy thirty
below.

I sniffed the air and caught the scent of the Venber. "Those guys just
do not give up!" I complained.

I smelled something else, too. Very close. Out on the ice a half mile away.

The polar bear. It took me a while to find him. I couldn't see his black
nose or eyes. When I finally did spot him, I realized why his eyes and
nose weren't visible.

"Hey, guys, check this out," I said. Jake, Rachel, and Cassie crawled
out of the hole and stood beside me at the lookout post. Jake was
carrying Ax and Tobias again. They'd promised not to bite.

"I smell polar bear," Cassie said. "But I can't see him."

93 "Try a little to your right," I said. Like this helped. The horizon
was nothing but a vast sheet of white paper, with a dark edge where the
water began.

"Oh, I see him," Rachel said. "What's he doing?"

Our pal had his entire head stuck in the ice, ostrich-style. He was a
giant set of four pillarlike legs with no head.

"He must be seal hunting," Cassie said.

We sat and watched him. The predator part of my brain was riveted.

We hadn't eaten anything for almost twenty-four hours. The extreme cold
was sapping our energy badly. If we didn't get something to eat soon,
we'd die. And the nearest Taco Bell was probably a thousand miles away.

The polar bear pulled his head out of the water, shook it, and lumbered
further out on the ice. Finally, when he was about twenty yards from the
water's edge, he dropped onto his stomach and slithered along a few feet
at a time.

The polar bear stopped. He'd found something.

Suddenly he raised one of his giant paws and slammed it through the ice.
I heard a desperate squealing and saw a pair of gray shapes scurry out
of the hole his paw had made. The shapes

94 scurried off and jumped back into the water a few yards away. The
bear kept his paw in the hole, reaching around for the seal he'd trapped.

Then he stuck his head through the hole. He stood up on his powerful
legs. He raised his head. The seal was in his jaws. But the seal was too
fat to fit through the hole.

He pulled it out anyway. The process made for instant, shredded seal.

"Oh my god!" Cassie cried.

"Geez," Rachel said.

"I could have lived without seeing that," I muttered.

"What happened?" Tobias asked. "What did he do?"

We watched him eat. He sat upright on his fat white hinder, holding the
big seal in both paws. He bit off huge chunks and gulped them down. Once
he put down the seal carcass, scooped some snow off the ice, and used it
to wash the blood off his face and paws.

It was disgusting. Even worse than some of the stuff you see in the
school cafeteria. But I watched it greedily. I hoped he would leave us
at least enough for a small meal.

"I think we have a situation here," Jake said quietly. Calmly. His wolf
tongue licked his wolf lips.

95 "Yeah," Rachel said warily. "We have to eat, don't we?"

"We haven't eaten anything for at least a day," I added.

I looked over at Cassie. She had to be freaked by what none of us had
the nerve to suggest we were suggesting. I mean, I was freaked by what
we were not suggesting. But unlike Cassie, I wasn't willing to let my
moral sense live while the rest of me died of starvation.

"Cassie?" Rachel said.

"What?" she replied, a hint of anger in her voice.

"What should we do?"

"Why are you asking me?"

I said, "We're not equipped to hunt in this environment, in these
morphs. We're freezing. If we don't eat soon we'll be too weak to plan
our next move, let alone finish what we came here to do. Destroy that
satellite station."

I know this sounds weird, but I'd kind of forgotten that we had a goal.
All I'd been thinking about was staying warm and fed. And alive.

"But you're waiting for me to give my approval? Is that it?" she said.

"Look," I began again. If I had to be the jerk in this situation, that
was fine. I was used to it. I was usually the first one to state the
obvious, no

96 matter how ugly it was. Just call me Mr. Ruthless. "In case you
haven't noticed, there doesn't seem to be a Mickey D's around here."

"I noticed that," Cassie said, a little annoyed. "It's obvious what we
have to do. And not just to the bear's leftovers, but to any live seal
we can find. What I don't understand is why you're asking me for
permission. Do you guys think I'd put an animal's life over yours? Or
mine, come to think of it?"

"I don't know," I started to say.

"You don't know? When did you start thinking I was some kind of fanatic?
We're freezing, we're starving, and I'm going to go all tree-hugging,
never-eat-anything-with-a-face on you?"

"Well, I can never tell what you'll think," I whined, taken aback and
feeling like I'd insulted Cassie.

"Here's a clue. Don't kill a sentient creature except in absolute
self-defense, try not to wipe out endangered species, and if you're
going to raise animals for food, treat them as well as you possibly can.
But when you're a wolf, a starving wolf wandering around the frozen
Arctic, and you see a meal, eat it."

Cassie is obviously not a morning person, either. This was grumpier than
I'd ever seen her. Probably, despite her tough talk, she was not looking
forward to eating cute seals for breakfast.

97 Come to think of it, I wasn't, either.

The two seals who'd escaped the bear were visible some distance off. We
looked at them with the intensity of hungry wolves.

"Nature isn't pretty," Tobias said, reassuring us. "It isn't supposed to
be."

"Yeah, survival of the fittest ..." Rachel muttered.

"A good philosophy," Ax said mordantly, "unless it turns out that the
Venber are fitter than we are."

98 The bear eventually dropped the seal carcass, stood up on all fours,
and lumbered away. When he was out of sight we walked to the
bloodstained spot. Four wolves and two fleas.

The body was about four feet long. The bear had left us plenty. In fact,
it looked like he'd just ripped off the skin and chowed on the seal's
blubber, leaving most of the meat for us. It was still steaming.

We stood there over it, looking briefly at each other and then back to
the body. None of us wanted to take that first bite.

"Ax? Tobias? What about you guys?" Jake asked. They were both stuck on
my skin somewhere.

99 "Actually," Ax replied sheepishly, "I am not hungry."

"Uh, me neither," Tobias mumbled.

"What?" said Rachel. "How can't you be hungry?" Then: "Oh."

"I apologize, Marco," Ax said. "The flea's instinct was quite strong."

"It's okay," Cassie said. "It's no worse than what we're about to do."

"Oh, yeah?" I said. "You can have them next, Cassie. You guys could've
at least asked."

"Let's just do this," Jake said abruptly.

He stuck his snout into the carcass and tore off a stringy piece of the
seal's flesh. We joined in after that, digging our sharp wolves' teeth
into the already half-frozen body, tearing off chunks and gulping them.

"Say, Ax," I said when I'd finished gorging. "Any idea where we are?"

"Far north," he said.

"Northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland," Rachel offered. "Iceland?"

"It may not be the Iceland, but it's an ice land," Tobias said. "Past
that, who cares?"

"We've got company," Jake interrupted.

A couple of Arctic foxes were sitting on the ice a hundred yards away.
They were about two feet long, with thick coats of long white fur.

100 "They'll just have to wait until we're done," Rachel said greedily.

"Life's going pretty well, huh?" I said. "We're down to chewing seal
bones. Not that I'm complaining. Any food is better than no food."

"It could use salt," Cassie said.

Coming from her, it was so unexpected we all burst out laughing.

"Salt? It could use a charcoal grill, some barbecue sauce and fries on
the side," Jake said. "And coffee. Hot coffee. I don't even drink coffee
and I want some."

Cassie stuck her nose in a drift and used the snow to wash the blood off
her mouth. Then she rubbed her paws in the snow to wash them off, too.

"Now what?" Cassie asked.

"Yeah. Now what, Dad?" I asked Jake.

He sighed. "So far we're just getting chased. You don't win by running
away. But first things first. We need to acquire some cold-weather
morphs. We're barely surviving right now. We need the power to go on
offense."

"What do you think the odds are that our pal the polar bear will let us
acquire him?" I asked.

Then my sensitive nose picked up the scent of seals, very close. Live
seals. I spotted the two little gray balls floating in the water. They
were the baby seals who'd escaped from the polar

101 bear. Looking right at us with those big black eyes.

They had faces like puppy dogs. Little heads with big eyes and whiskers.
No ears. I usually like to reserve the word cute for myself exclusively,
but there was really no other way to describe them.

"They're looking for their mother," Cassie said.

Their mother? Their mother was ...

An unexpected wave of emotion swept over me. Dumb, I know, but for two
years I thought my mom was dead. Not the same, though. Was it?

Watching those little seals floating in the water, waiting for the
mother who would never return, brought all the sadness back in a rush.

I moved between them and the horrible carcass on the ice. It wasn't our
doing, killing their mother. But we'd profited from it.

"Our cold-weather morphs," Rachel said. "Right there."

102 Jake came up with the plan. Cassie and I volunteered.

The job wasn't that hard, actually. While still on the ice, Cassie and I
demorphed and remorphed into dolphins. We had to move fast. Dolphins are
relatively warm-water animals, with no fur or blubber to help them deal
with that kind of killing cold.

Then Jake and Rachel pushed us into the freezing water. I felt like one
of those clowns you see on the news occasionally. You know - the ones
who like to go swimming in the freezing winter ocean. In nothing but
swimming trunks. The minute I hit the water I could feel my whole

103 dolphin body, usually so full of energy and playfulness, go stiff
and numb.

The seal pups barely even tried to escape. In any case, it was a vain
try. Seals are amazingly agile, but we had the speed and the size and
the intensity.

They dodged and weaved once or twice, but they were no match for us. I
tried not to think about what that meant for their future. If they were
no match for a couple of chilly dolphins, they'd be no match for the
first killer whale or polar bear to come along.

Cassie and I grabbed one in a perfectly executed, acrobatic maneuver. We
came up swiftly behind him and each grabbed a flipper.

The pup struggled, but this was a case of Great Dane versus Chihuahua.
He did, however, manage to scratch me on the nose a few times with his
tiny teeth. It drew blood. It hurt, and it felt good. I felt like I
deserved it.

After we'd gotten a good grip on him with our mouths, being careful not
to hurt him, we pulled him back to the others. They'd started to demorph
when they saw us coming back.

We nosed the little seal up onto the ice. Up at the feet of a strange
little collection of unlikely creatures: two humans dressed for an
August day, a red-tailed hawk shifting from talon to frozen talon on the
ice, and Ax.

104 Jake and Rachel grabbed the pup and held him between them. First
one, then the other, acquired the pup's DNA. They held him still as Ax
pressed his many-fingered hand into the wet fur. Tobias fluttered up and
landed on Rachel's shoulder. A painful thing for Rachel, though by then
she was too cold to feel the bite of the talons.

The seal pup looked up, mystified but amused at the winged creature who
gingerly touched him with his talon.

Cassie and I propelled ourselves up out of the water and demorphed on
the ice. Not a pleasant experience. My skin froze to the ice halfway
between dolphin and human. I ended up leaving an inch of Marco behind.

"Have I mentioned that it's cold?" I shivered, human once more. I
touched the seal. Wet and firm and soft. Like touching a furry water
balloon.

"Sorry," I said, for no good reason.

"Nothing we can do," Cassie said. She set the pup back down on the ice.
He scooted to the water's edge and slid in, rejoining his - or her -
brother or sister.

"They might m-m-make it," Rachel chattered.

But Cassie shook her head. For some reason she smiled sadly at Tobias.
"No, they won't make it. But they'll feed some orca or polar bear, and
you can't go all mushy over these guys without

105 realizing that orca babies and polar bear babies have an equal right
to live."

"Still, if we could ..." Tobias said.

They were remembering the skunk litter we'd once saved. Tobias had eaten
one of the skunk kits. Then he'd helped Cassie keep the rest alive.

"Nature, huh?" Rachel said.

"Yeah. Nature," he replied. "Guess we better morph."

"Or we could just stand here and freeze solid while discussing survival
of the fittest," I said. I was hopping from bare foot to bare foot,
trying not to let either freeze to the ice.

Rachel gave me one of her patented, insolent smiles. "You in a hurry,
Marco? Has it occurred to you yet that if those little guys are some
killer whale's meat, we w-w-will be, too?"

That had not occurred to me. Now it was occurring to me in vivid color
with sound effects. "That's a happy thought, Rachel."

"Always here for you, Marco," she said. But already Rachel was changing.

I focused my cold-addled brain on the new image of the seal. And then,
slowly at first, I began to morph.

My arms began to shrink. Smaller, smaller. Weird doll-sized replicas of
arms that shrank till they were no more than three inches long.

106 My fingers shrunk, too, but from the tips grew long, ice-gripping
claws. The fingers melted together, then instantly separated again,
drawing a thin web of flesh between.

My legs were almost disappearing. I knew I was going to fall, but it
still surprised me when I suddenly just plopped over, face first, onto
ice. My feet shrank and narrowed and transformed themselves into the
seal's flippers.

All the while my torso was growing smaller and yet chubbier. Blubber
bubbled up beneath my skin. It was a little like that movie with Eddie
Murphy, The Nutty Professor. Like that, only on a smaller scale.

I heard squishy sounds as my internal organs twisted around to fit my
new body. My bones cracked and groaned, reshaping themselves to form my
new skeleton. I was now an over-inflated football with flippers.

On my still-human face I grew long whiskers. My ears shriveled up and
into my skull, leaving just a pair of holes! My head was no bigger than
a baseball, while my nose stretched itself out until it was shaped like
a puppy's.

I looked out at the frozen world through large, dark eyes and discovered
that they saw about as well as my human ones.

Finally, short, thick fur sprouted all over my

107 body, rippling across my chest and down my back like I was a Chia pet.

And then ... and then ...

Oh! The joy! The blessing! The fabulous, incredible, sensuous sensation!
The most wonderful thing I have ever felt from the day of my birth to
that very moment.

Warmth!

I was warm! Warm! If the heavens had opened and a giant hand had come
down out of the clouds, giving me a billion dollars, my pick from the
entire cast of Baywatch - past and present, and allowing me to grow two
feet taller while magically acquiring all of Michael Jordan's skill with
a basketball, I could not have been happier.

I! Was! WARM!

Cold? What cold? There was no cold.

I was on the beach at Malibu, sipping lemonade and talking trash with
Tom Cruise.

I felt other things, of course. The seal's instincts were all there: an
urge to run, an urge to chase fish, yadda yadda, but come on, I was warm!

My whiskers were amazingly sensitive. They felt even the slightest
change in wind, the slightest movement from anyone else in our group.
And part of me was still sniffing for my mother,

108 but I, Marco, was the one in control. And I, Marco, was warm.

Did I mention I was warm? And happy? For about three seconds.

"The Venber!" Tobias yelled, blowing my happy mood away.

"Where?" Jake snapped. TSEEEEEEEEW!

A huge bolt of blistering light hit the ice not a foot away. If it had
hit rock, we'd have been blown apart in the shrapnel explosion. But it
hit a patch of perfectly smooth ice SHWAAANGGG!

Ricochet! The Dracon cannon blast hit at a low angle, hit reflective
ice, bounced, and blew a hole in the side of the ridge behind us.

It was a one-in-a-million shot. We decided not to try for two.

"Run! Dive! NOW!" Jake yelled.

Run. Yeah, right, no problem. I spun my ball-shaped body. We were only a
few feet from the water, but it seemed like a mile with these weird
little legs. No, not legs. Feet. Feet with no legs. Not a good
land-going combination. I shuffled my fat belly right and left, right
and left, and inched toward the water.

It probably looked funny. It didn't feel funny

TSEEEEEEW!

Ka-BOOOM!

109 A miss, but not by much. Water and oil rose in a column behind us,
Old Faithful at sub-zero temperatures.

"They must have just seen us morph!" Cassie said.

"Maybe they just really hate seals," I said. But even in my panic I
realized the importance of what Cassie had said. If the Venber knew we
were human, we couldn't allow them to reach the Yeerks again.

I shuffled my fat belly over the ice, picked up momentum, saw the
water's edge, kicked frantically and ...

The next cannon blast blew the spot where we'd been into ice cubes.

But by then, I was in the water.

110 Awkward as our seal bodies were on land, they were perfect for the
water. We couldn't swim as fast as dolphins, and our tail flippers
weren't as efficient as a dolphin's tail, but we cruised, using our
front flippers as rudders.

"We should be safe under the surface," Jake said. "There's no way they
can follow us, right, Ax?"

"I believe not, Prince Jake," Ax replied.

I noticed one of the others doing it first. Making little clicking
noises. Echolocation. Like dolphins. Like bats. Like Venber.

I shot off a few clicks of my own. What bounced back was an amazing
picture of my

111 surroundings: every fish, every plant, several other seals close by,
every chunk of ice floating on the surface.

We swam for maybe half an hour. Back toward the Yeerk base. Back toward
our mission, long-forgotten in the rush to stay alive.

It was also, we hoped, a good tactic. We would be doubling back on the
Venber. With any luck at all, they'd search the ice for us till they
became extinct. Again.

"Did they see us? I mean, as humans?" I asked.

"Why else would they take a shot at a bunch of seals?" Tobias wondered.

"Great. Now we have a whole new problem," Rachel said. "We can't let
them reach the Yeerk base."

"Go kick their butts, Rachel. Let me know when you're done."

"There is a way to ensure that these Venber do not connect with the
Yeerks," Ax pointed out. "Destroy the Yeerk base."

"Yeah, 'cause that'll be so easy," I said.

"Wipe out the base, we eliminate the problem," Jake reasoned. "Kill two
birds with one stone, as they say. Sorry, Tobias," he added as an
afterthought.

We stopped twice to surface and catch a

112 breath. Seals can only hold their breath for about ten or fifteen
minutes. We spy-hopped up through holes in the ice, but the frozen
monsters were nowhere to be seen. Neither were any bears.

For the first time since we'd landed in this godforsaken place, I felt
almost comfortable. I should have known the feeling wouldn't last.

"Here they come!" Cassie yelled. For a split second I didn't know what
"they" were, but then I felt a vibration in my whiskers and knew the
threat came from the water.

That meant one thing.

Orca! Killer whales!

"MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!" Jake screamed.

We moved. But then, down through the murk of water, I saw them. Twin
submarines in white and black.

Willy-free and looking for a seal meal.

"Oh, man," Tobias groaned. "They're on us!"

"These are very large creatures," Ax said with more than a little panic
in his voice.

"Yeah, they are," Rachel replied. "And I think they've got big
appetites, too."

I pumped my rear flippers as fast as I could. Above us, sheet ice. A
hole! We needed a hole!

There! Light!

I shot toward the hole. I saw the others converging with me.

113 One, two, three, four, five, six, we blew through the hole, into the
air and landed on ice.

Mad scrambling to get away from the hole, crazed, clumsy scrabbling. But
then I looked down. Down through the ice I saw a black-and-white smile.

I could see the orca. Which meant ...

"Cut left!" I yelled.

Crrrrrack! Pah-LOOOSH! The huge, blunt snout exploded through the ice
like a scene out of Hunt for Red October.

Right beside me! The ice rose up, a brand new mountain. I slid down the
steepening slope and motored my pathetic claws.

Crrrrrack!

The second killer whale erupted, not ten feet in front of us. They were
working together. Trapping us.

"I am so totally sick of this mission!" I shouted.

"Morph!" Cassie yelled. "They hunt seals, not humans."

Great advice. But try demorphing when the Navy from Hell is popping up
all around you, grinning big toothy grins and eyeballing you like you're
a cheeseburger.

I scrambled and slid and began to emerge into my human shape.

114 The orca behind me dropped down into the water, then shot - if you
can picture a black-and-white sausage the size of a stretch limo
shooting - straight up.

Over my head and dropping toward me!

Any normal seal would have kept going in a straight line, and any normal
seal would have been lunch. But I had a human brain. I dug one claw into
the ice and spun to my right.

A huge load of sleek blubber landed with a crash inches behind me. Mouth
open, the orca was ready to snap me up.

Only I wasn't there anymore. And by the time Willy spotted me again, I
had very cold arms and very cold legs and was hobbling away like some
hideous freak of nature.

Willy thought that over. He decided he didn't want to be eating anything
that looked quite like me.

The two seal-killers slid back down through the ice and went off about
their murderous day while I stood there, demorphing and shaking and
shivering and chattering out words I can't repeat here.

I saw the others, spread out over a hundred yards or so, all in their
normal bodies, all looking about like I felt.

"Is this just the absolute armpit of the universe?" I demanded.

115 "Ask him," Rachel said.

Only then did I notice that everyone was not staring at me. But past me.

I turned. And I said, "Hi. Um ... no offense about the armpit thing and
all."

"None taken," he said.

116 I guess I expected him to run. But he didn't. He just stared at me,
then at the others, then back at me.

He was sitting in a beat-up little fishing boat with a small outboard
motor. It suddenly occurred to me that he'd probably scared the killer
whales off with his engine.

I kept looking at him. He kept looking at me. I didn't know what to do.
Or what to say.

So I waved and said, "Hi. How's it going?"

He didn't say anything for a minute. Just stared. Finally he said, "You
some kind of spirit or something?"

I put my frozen hand on my frozen chest. "A

117 spirit? What makes you say that?" I made a lame attempt at laughter.

He grabbed his oar and paddled closer.

He had a large, round face, with slightly slanted black eyes and skin
like well-worn boot leather. Inuit, I guessed, what with this being the
frozen north. In any case, I was pretty sure he wasn't French.

He was wearing a weird combination of clothes. Pants made of fur,
mittens made of some other kind of fur, and a shabby, big, blue parka
that could have come from Eddie Bauer's.

"You look cold," he said when his boat had touched the edge of the ice.
"I didn't think animal spirits got cold. You want a blanket?" He held up
a huge piece of fur, dark gray and silver with light gray rings. The
same kind of fur I'd been in just two minutes ago. I took it and wrapped
it around myself and under my feet while he drove a spike into the ice's
edge, anchoring his boat.

"How about your friends?" he asked. "They animal spirits, too?"

"I guess so."

He eyed me with more curiosity than fear. More interest than skepticism.
He wasn't much older than I was. It seemed weird that a kid so

118 young would be out all by himself in the middle of nowhere.

Of course, I wasn't one to be calling anyone else weird.

"My grandfather used to talk about animal spirits all the time. I just
thought he was crazy." He spun his finger around his ear in that
universal gesture of insanity. "But I always told him, 'Yeah, that's
right, Grandpa.' "

"Uh-huh," I said, covering my ears from the freezing wind. "I mean, you
never can tell, can you?"

He stared some more. "Tell your friends I have more pelts."

"He has pelts!" I yelled a little too loudly. "How about if you guys all
come on over and have some nice, warm pelts?"

Not that I was worried. Not that I needed company.

The others came closer.

The guy began handing up sealskins out of his boat. They were piled
high. But a number of them looked as if they'd been burned. Scorch marks
parted the fur.

"Are you an eagle?" he asked Tobias, peering curiously at him.

"A hawk, actually. A red-tail. We're a very common species."

119 "Not around here. The birds around here don't talk." Then he focused
intensely on Ax. "What are you?"

I could almost hear everyone sigh in relief. If this guy was a
Controller, he would (a) know an Andalite when he saw one and (b) stay
far, far away.

"I'm an Andalite."

"You a common species, too?"

A joke! I decided to like the guy. Besides, anyone who could be this
laid-back about running into our little freak show had to be all right.

"That's a lot of sealskins," Cassie said, huddling within one herself.

"Yeah. A lot. Not so good, though. All those burned ones, barely worth
hauling to the trading post. And anyway, they'll come off my quota. Bad."

"How did they get burned?" Cassie asked, already knowing the answer as
well as I did.

"Those crazy Star Trek men. Shooting seals with phasers and all. Like
those people are using them for target practice or something. They show
no respect. Makes me mad."

"Star Trek guys?" I said.

"Yeah," he replied. Then, "Oh, I guess you animal spirits don't watch
TV, huh? You need to get a satellite dish, Spirit-boy."

120 "The name's Marco. That's Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias ... he's the
one with the wings and Ax. Ax isn't from around here."

"Hi. I'm Derek."

"Derek?" I don't know what I expected to hear, but it wasn't Derek.

"Are you all alone out here?" Cassie asked.

"Yeah."

"How far away is your home?" Tobias asked.

"Oh, a ways." He cocked his head toward the west. The kid was talking to
a bird. But he didn't even flinch. "Coupla days."

"A couple of days?" Jake said.

"Sure. I go on hunts every year," he said. "Since I was a kid."

"And you hunt seals?" Cassie asked, her voice level.

"Yeah." Derek cocked his head. "You don't like hunting?"

"Well ... not like the crazy Star Trek guys."

"Hunting for sport. Like it's a game. Yeah, we get guys come up here for
that. Up from New York and Detroit. Shoot bears and caribou from
helicopters. No respect for nothing, those guys. Those guys at the
station, though, they're the worst. They're just crazy for killing." He
cocked his head. "That must make you animal spirits mad."

121 "We ... we never exactly said we were spirits," Jake said.

"No? So what are you, then?" he asked. "Aliens?"

"He's an alien," I said, pointing at Ax. "The rest of us are just idiots."

The guy smiled. His expression hardened. He didn't like not getting
answers. "You have something to do with that station they're building?
With those big ice creatures? With the spaceships?"

I shot a look at Jake. He shrugged.

"Yeah, we have something to do with them," I said.

"Yeah?" he answered. "Well, I don't like them. What are they doing up
there, anyway? They aren't any of those ecology people come up here
sometimes. They aren't hunters, either. They're making a mess in the
water. Scaring away everything with their noise and their weird guns.
Who are they? Who are you!"

"I guess you could say they're the bad guys," Jake said. "And we're the
good guys. We came here to destroy that station."

"Sounds good to me," Derek replied. Like it was no big deal. Like we'd
just suggested a visit to the local 7-Eleven. "I hope you do. I worry
Nanook's gonna stick his big nose around

122 there and end up getting it shot off or something."

"Nanook?" Jake said. "Who's Nanook?"

"Nanook's my friend. You don't know Nanook?"

"Uh, should we?" I said.

"You must've seen him," he continued. "He's been around here the last
few days. I've been following him. I like to watch him work. He's a very
great hunter."

"Maybe we have seen him," Jake said, puzzled. "What does he look like?"

"Well, he's pretty big, with white fur," he began.

"Oh, himl" Great. The Inuit comic. "Yeah, we've seen him."

"You've been hunting him?" Rachel said. "With that?" She pointed at the
rifle in the bottom of his boat. And his short spear. "You're gonna need
more firepower."

"Not hunting him. Tracking him. Nanook's my buddy. Known him since I was
a kid."

"Well, here's a really insane question," I said brightly. "Do you think
we could pet him?"

123 We didn't have to go far to find Derek's friend Nanook.

We morphed back to seals, followed Derek's boat, and found the polar
bear sprawled on the ice on his back, lounging in the sun. Like he was
at the beach. Frankly, it annoyed me. How could any creature enjoy this
place?

We crawled up onto the ice a few hundred yards away from the bear and
demorphed to human.

"I wish I could do that," Derek said, watching with interest as human
faces appeared on seal bodies.

We'd been careful to stay downwind of the bear. We'd been chased enough.

124 The plan was simple. The kind of plan we come up with when we just
can't think of anything smart or subtle.

"So you're gonna just go grab old Nanook?" Derek asked skeptically.

"Yeah. Why? Something strange about that? Something totally, absolutely
INSANE about that?" I asked.

"That is sarcasm," Ax helpfully explained to the Inuit.

"Yeah," Derek said. "I thought maybe it was."

I looked at Rachel. She and I had the fun part of this plan.

She grinned her Xena grin. "Okay, Marco, yes, even I think this is insane."

She was already morphing. Growing huge-shouldered, with rail-spike claws
and shaggy brown fur. I was morphing, too. Back to gorilla. The only
other morph we had that could help with this particular plan.

Together our little gaggle advanced on the polar bear. A grizzly, a
gorilla, a bird, an alien, and two humans wrapped in seal pelts.

Derek stayed behind. He didn't offer any explanation. None needed: He
was sane. When you're the only sane one at the lunatic picnic, you don't
have to explain.

The polar bear abruptly rolled over. "He's

125 noticed you," Derek called out from his safe distance.

Jake, Cassie, Ax, and Tobias all hung back. Rachel and I kept going forward.

"This whole thing would be killer on Pay-Per-View," I said. "Extreme
Fighting: two bears and King Kong."

"I go straight at him. You grab him from behind."

"Yep."

"Ready?"

"Nope."

"GO!" Rachel yelled, and we were off at a slipping, sliding, panicked,
pants-wetting-if-I'd-had-pants run.

Bear-to-bear! The polar bear didn't even flinch. Rachel dropped to all
fours and slammed into the other bear's shoulder. Brown on white.

Whumpf!

"Hrrroooowwwwr!"

"Hrrroooowwwwr!"

Raking claws! Snapping jaws. The two bears were up on their hind legs
now, swinging away like a pair of super heavyweights.

Rachel was not winning. She wasn't losing, but she was also not winning.

She shoved. The polar bear shoved back. Rachel landed on her back.

126 It was a shocking sight. I hadn't thought there was anything strong
enough to knock a grizzly down. I saw a spray of blood across the polar
bear's white chest. Rachel's blood.

I was in a loping run, trying to get around behind the big white
monster, but the two bears were up again, on all fours, circling,
circling, lunging!

WHAM!

"I could use some help here!" Rachel yelled.

The polar bear was a hair taller, maybe heavier, too. On the other hand,
he was just a bear. While Rachel was human. Well, at least her brain was
human.

The polar bear rose to its full height, ready to come crashing down on
Rachel. That's when Rachel rolled into it. Not a bear move.

The polar bear went down, tripping over Rachel to slam jaw-first into
the ice.

"Hah!" Rachel yelled. "Now I don't want your help, Marco. I'm taking
this guy down myself."

I considered it for a split second. But I was pretty sure Jake would not
approve. I leaped forward and grabbed the polar bear's right arm.

He shoved himself off Rachel and swung his arm to throw me off. He
didn't throw me off. But he did fling me into a nearly flawless double
axel.

I kept my grip, but let me tell you something: Polar bears are strong.
Gorillas are so strong they

127 can rip saplings out of the ground. And this guy was stronger.

I held his one arm and Rachel slammed directly into his belly, headfirst.

The polar bear went "wooof!" and froze for just a second while he sucked
wind. The second was enough. I grabbed his other arm - well, leg
actually - and pinned him in a sort of full nelson.

Rachel wrapped her own big paws around him and together we wrestled Hulk
Frozen to the ice.

Tobias swooped down out of the sky, complaining about there being no
lift at all in this cold air. Like that was the major drama.

He sank talons into Derek's friend Nanook and began to acquire him,
while Rachel and I lay panting and counting our wounds. The bear went
into the acquiring trance and a few minutes later we all had his DNA
floating around inside us.

We let the bear go and ran like ninnies back to the water's edge.

"That was cool," Derek said. "This will make a great story for me to
tell. No one will believe it, but it will be a great story."

Nanook the polar bear went lumbering off. No doubt to tell some stories
of his own. I could hear it now: "No, seriously! A gorilla. I'm minding
my own business, and suddenly there's this gorilla ..."

128 We left Derek. He said there was a storm on the way. So we said
good-bye and let him go to tell whatever stories he wanted to tell. If
he told a Controller he'd seen humans morphing, it would be trouble. But
it occurred to us that an Inuit village in the middle of absolute
nowhere was probably not high on the Yeerks' list of places to take over.

We had morphed the polar bear, giving Derek one last bizarre
performance. Star Trek? Hah! He wouldn't be seeing this kind of thing on
his satellite dish any time soon.

Now we were feeling pretty good. Better than we had since arriving here
in Popsicle World.

We had the morph for this place. Like being a

129 tiger in the jungle or a crocodile in a swamp, we owned this place now.

Owned it!

I've been a gorilla. I've been a rhinoceros. I've felt power before. But
this was new.

I stood nearly ten feet tall, reared up. I weighed maybe fifteen hundred
pounds. And if those numbers don't mean anything to you, think about it
this way. I was three feet taller than Shaquille O'Neal. I weighed five
times as much as him.

I could have dribbled Shaq the length of the court and stuffed him. I
was mighty. I was seriously mighty.

My front paws were a foot wide. Each had five webbed toes with long,
black claws. My powerful front legs could have flipped over a pickup truck.

And the cold?

What cold? If the thick layer of blubber underneath my skin wasn't
enough, my body had made other adaptations for warmth.

My fur looked white, but it wasn't. It was transparent. Transparent and
hollow. Every bristle was like a little greenhouse, turning sunlight
into warmth, which was absorbed by my black skin.

I could see just as well as I did as a human, maybe a little better. Far
better than poor Rachel in her grizzly morph. My hearing was only

130 average, but my sense of smell was awesome. I could smell seals all
over the place.

Not much else to smell, when you think about it.

The bear mind that lay just beneath my human consciousness was no
bubbling stew of emotions, no panic, no fanatic hunger. Nanook was calm.
Completely without fear. What was there to fear?

He could go for weeks without eating. Hunting was more about play than
survival. He actually spent more time lounging around than he did
looking for food.

We sauntered back toward the Yeerk base with the cockiness of Clint
Eastwood going into the town saloon.

It was a long walk, punctuated by refreshing plunges into the icy water.
We ended up having to demorph, of course, and that was no fun at all.
But then it was back to being Lords of the Ice.

"Guess Derek was right about the storm," Tobias said.

The wind was pretty bad by the time we came in sight of the Yeerk base.
No new snow was falling, but the drifts were being whipped up and thrown
around. Visibility was dropping fast.

"It may be helpful to us," Ax suggested.

Jake was surveying the half mile of scenery ahead between us and the
base. "I'm thinking

131 we approach from the water. Last direction they'd expect an attack
to come from."

The base came to within a hundred yards or so of the water at one point.
It was a collection of corrugated steel buildings, an unattractive bunch
of structures placed seemingly at random. There were vehicles - Sno-Cats
and big trucks and motorized cranes. Nothing alien to the casual
observer. Unless you happened to notice the big silver Venber, bending
steel with their bare hands as they built the main satellite dish.

"What do we do about them?" Cassie wondered.

"Try and stay out of their way," Tobias suggested.

"How about afterward?"

"Take them home and make them pets?" I suggested.

"They are a unique species," Ax said. "They may not be pure Venber, but
I would dislike being the latest to exploit and destroy them."

I said, "You know, fearless leader, it occurs to me we're big tough
bears and all, but just exactly how are we supposed to destroy that
base? Maybe we better focus on that first."

132 Night was falling. Gloom spread slowly over the lake, turning the
ice a ghostly blue. At the base, the lights came on. The Venber didn't
need them, but the human-Controllers in their Michelin Man parkas did.

We came with the night. Moving as silently as we could, single file so
that at a casual glance a person might only see one bear.

We had a plan. The four fateful words that usually end up meaning a lot
of yelling, screaming, mayhem, and madness.

One thing we knew. Or hoped we knew: Visser Three was not at the base.
Not even the big hangar building could have contained his Blade ship.
That was some relief. Unfortunately, the

133 Venber were there. They worked on, oblivious to changing light.
Heedless of the plummeting temperature.

They knew we were out there on the ice. Knew at least that a bear was
out there. We kept our line straight. Would their echolocation show more
than one shape? Would they have the wit to sound an alarm?

There was no way to know, as we crunched across the ice, staring at one
another's big bear butts. Jake in the lead. Tobias behind him. Then me,
Cassie, Ax, and Rachel.

Closer and closer, in slow motion. No running. No sudden charge. Just
that slow, steady, lumbering walk.

We were totally exposed. No cover. Nothing at all between us and a
well-aimed Dracon blast. The Venber we saw weren't armed. They were
wielding tools, carrying, shaping, twisting. But the Dracon cannon
couldn't be too far off.

It was like one of those Civil War battles. Walk, walk, walk, standing
upright, no dodging and weaving, just walking steadily toward death.
Nothing you could do about the bullet that blows a hole in your heart.
Nothing.

Closer and closer. We could hear their heavy footsteps. We could smell
their strange, chemical smell. I could see the effortless power as they
worked.

134 One of them swung his big hammerhead around and seemed to look right
at us. But that was it. Just a look.

And now we were practically among them. Venber to the left. Venber to
the right. I had stopped breathing. Our little single-file subterfuge
was all over. They could see plainly that we were six great big bears.

No reaction. Work continued. We kept walking while my brain screamed the
word "ambush!" over and over.

Suddenly a door opened. A rectangle of light. Loud human laughter. A man
or woman - who could tell? - in a huge parka stepped out onto the ice.
And froze.

She stared at us. We kept moving. No one here but us bears, ma'am.
Nothing to worry about. Just a little bear parade.

"ALARM!" she screamed. Definitely a she. "ALARM! ALARM!"

"The hangar!" Jake ordered. "Go for the hangar!"

We broke into a run. And we could move out when we needed to.

Past the Venber!

The big hangar door was shut and locked, but we barreled toward it,
heedless of the searchlights that snapped on everywhere. Heedless of

135 the human-Controllers pouring from the buildings.

"Andalites in morph!" someone yelled. He sounded in control. Not
panicked. He sounded like a guy with a big stick to swing. "Program the
Venber! Target: any quadruped. Override all security protocols. The
Andalites must not escape."

Program the Venber?

"That explains much," Ax said.

It explained diddly to me, but maybe I was just too busy thinking about
what a creature who could twist rebar like it was spaghetti could do to me.

"Keep moving! Side door! Side door to the left!" Jake commanded.

To my left, a slight figure. Another woman? A kid? Stepped out, carrying
what I would have sworn was a TV remote control. She was calmly punching
keys on the thing.

"Here they come!" Rachel yelled from the back of our disordered line.

We knew who "they" were.

The Venber dropped their tools, dropped their sheet metal and rebar, and
broke into a loping, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, cross-country run. Five of
them! No! Two more ahead, closing in, trying to cut us off.

136 "Don't fight them, keep moving!"

But two lines were converging: two Venber, six bears, with the hangar
side door being the point of intersection.

WHUMPF!

The first Venber hit Jake headlong. Jake missed the door and slammed
hard against the side of the hangar. He left a big dent in the
corrugated metal.

Tobias, right behind him, lunged for the Venber, roaring.

The Venber swung one of his beefy twin arms and knocked Tobias
sprawling. He might as well have been a teddy bear.

A second Venber was closing on me. If I fought, I'd lose. Keep running!
STOP! I dug in my claws. A shower of ice crystals and the Venber blew
past me, too clumsy to turn in time.

The monster crashed headlong into the side of the hangar. Now we didn't
need a door. There was a nice, big, Bugs-Bunny-runs-through-the-door
kind of hole. You could almost make out the Venber's silhouette in the
steel.

Cassie plowed into me, knocking me forward. We both picked ourselves up
and hauled.

The first Venber was after Jake, swinging arms that would shatter Jake's
bones if they connected.

137 "Don't worry about me! GO!" Jake said, seeing us hesitate.

We went. Tobias was already picking himself up to give Jake a hand, so
we went. Through the hole. Into ... warmth!

Bright lights! A huge space. Two parked Bug fighters!

And there, on the floor between us and the nearest Bug fighter, a Venber.

Or what was left of him.

138 Silent, ghastly, he writhed. The lower half of his body was already
a spreading pool of viscous liquid. A powerful smell hit us. Like
chlorine or something.

The top half of the Venber kept reaching for us. Trying to obey its
programming. It was nothing but a biological computer. A hideous
creation of the Yeerks. Even in its own death throes it could do nothing
but obey its programming.

We splashed through the Venber's liquid body. There was no other way. I
felt a chemical tingle on my paws. I tracked it onto the floor beyond.

"Jake!" I yelled. "Get them into the hangar!"

Human-controllers now, rushing around from

139 behind the Bug fighter. Dracon beams in their hands, but they were
too slow.

"Hhhhhrrroooohhhwwwr!"

Rachel and Ax roared and plowed into them. The human-Controllers went
down like bowling pins.

Jake and Tobias came up behind, still running, bloodied, their white fur
ripped away in chunks. Two big Venber were after them.

The two Venber hit the warm air. They kept charging, even as their ski
feet turned to glue.

Another, right behind them. Charging, deadly one second, then pitiful
the next.

I froze there, staring. Watching the mindless suicide. They came at us,
leaping through the gap, slowing, stumbling, falling, melting.

Ax was aboard the nearest Bug fighter. I snapped out of my horrified
trance and realized they all were. All but Cassie and I.

We waited till all eight of the Venber at the base had destroyed
themselves. I don't know why. With all the danger, all the terror,
someone still needed to be a witness. Someone needed to be able to tell
the world someday about this Yeerk atrocity.

"Marco! Cassie! What are you doing? Come on!" Rachel yelled.

We turned away, with Venber remains staining our footsteps, and crammed
aboard the Bug

140 fighter. The others were already demorphing. Otherwise there'd be no
way to fit this much bear into a ship designed for a Hork-Bajir, a
Taxxon, and maybe one or two passengers.

Ax was emerging from the bear, blue fur replacing white, his stalk eyes
rising from the bear's quizzical brow. His paws were slimming down into
Andalite fingers as he engaged the ship's controls.

"We are powered up, Prince Jake," Ax said calmly. "Who will take weapons?"

"I will," I said.

The Bug fighter rose gently from the hangar floor. Through the
transparent forward panels we could see human-Controllers splashing
through the almost entirely liquefied Venber. One Venber head and arm
were still ... and then that was gone, too.

I was more human than bear. I'd been aboard a Bug fighter before, and I
more or less knew the weapons station. Not much to it, really. Easier
than a Nintendo joystick.

"The other Bug fighter," Jake said, sounding very calm.

Ax turned our ship till our two Dracon spikes were aimed point-blank at
the other ship.

"Low power, please," Ax suggested.

I fired. Even at low power the concussion

141 from the disintegrating Bug fighter knocked us back against one of
the corrugated steel walls.

We swiveled and blew the wall into atoms. Ax kicked the ship into gear
and we were out in the night, circling above the base.

"The dish,"Jake said.

I fired.

TSEEEEEEW!

The dish blew into atoms.

"That building over there."

TSEEEEEEW! Building gone.

We systematically destroyed the base, building by building, vehicle by
vehicle. Each time, we allowed time for the human-Controllers to run
like scared sheep. It was the base we wanted, not them.

Finally, Jake said, "The hangar."

I aimed and fired. The last remains of the Venber became smoke and steam
and loose atoms.

"Rest in peace," someone said. It turned out to be Rachel.

We hauled up and out and south as fast as the little ship would move.
But we didn't get far.

"Sensor probe!" Ax yelled. His hands flew over the console. "We're being
probed by ..." He waited while the ship's computer came up with the answer.

142 "The Blade ship, Prince Jake. It is on an intercept course."

"Can we outrun it? Lose it?"

"No. However, we can travel some distance before it catches us."

We raced south. The Blade ship came on like a cheetah after a pig. We
had a big head start, but the cheetah was going to be enjoying bacon,
and nothing was going to change that.

Three minutes before the Blade ship would have intercepted us, we blew
the Bug fighter to smithereens. It was a huge fireball in someone's
night sky. No doubt a lot of people saw it and wondered.

They did not see the six birds of prey that floated down to Earth.

143 It took two more days for us to get home. We hid out on trains and
trucks. We flew. We enjoyed the warmth.

Once, as we floated high on a wonderful warm thermal, we talked about
the Venber. There were still two who might be alive, wandering the
frozen Arctic. They might even know that the creatures they'd chased
were human. A loose end. But the Venber wouldn't be heading south to
civilization any time soon.

"Next time you hear a story about an Abominable Snowman, maybe there'll
be some truth to it," Tobias pointed out.

Don't know why we cared. The Venber had

144 tried to kill us. Only they

We made it home and relieved the Chee who'd taken our places. I don't
know if they were glad to be done playing their parts or not. Who can
tell what an android thinks?

I put the whole thing behind me. You have to do that. You can't be in a
war and think about all the stuff that happens. You can't keep all the
fear and all the pain right there in the front part of your brain, you
know? You go nuts like that.

But some things are hard to get past. Sometimes it's the little things.

"Marco? Are you still alive?" my dad yelled up the stairs.

"Yeah, Dad," I answered.

"You've been in there for an hour! Are you ever coming out?"

"Well, sure, eventually," I said.

"Could you at least turn on the fan? The whole house is turning into a
sauna."

"Sorry," I said. "I forgot."

That was a lie. I hadn't forgotten. I wanted the whole house to feel
like a sauna. And I was considering staying in the shower forever.

145 Heat. Man, heat is a very, very nice thing. For humans, anyway.

"Marco!" My dad, yelling again, this time from somewhere closer by.

"What?" I yelled back through the steam.

"Your room is a total pigsty!"

When I'd gotten home, I'd been horrified to see someone had cleaned my
room. I mean, cleaned it. There was not a chip bag to be found! So much
for Erek playing the role of me. Hah!

"I suppose I shouldn't have expected this sudden neat stage to last," my
dad muttered outside the bathroom door.

"Yeah, well," I said, reluctantly turning off the faucet.

"I appreciate what you did to the basement and garage, though. I've
never seen them look so good."

"Oh, sure," I replied. "Say, did Marian happen to call in the last
couple of days?"

"In the last couple of days?" Dad repeated. "No. I would have told you
if she had."

"Oh," I said. "Oh, well."

"Hey, you want to go out and catch something to eat?"

I stuck my wet head out of the door. "Like what?"

"I was thinking ice cream."

146 "Ice cream."

"Yeah. Ice cream."

"Excuse me." I closed the door, stepped back in the shower, and turned
on the water. Hot. Very, very hot.

146

[blank page]

Marco, the other Animorphs, and Ax have managed to find out where the
Yeerks are planning to build their next ground-based Kandrona. That's a
good thing. The location is supposed to be somewhere around the North
Pole. That's a bad thing. The Animorphs and Ax know that the Yeerks are
a "cold-blooded" species, but this is a little nuts! Who wants to be
anywhere near the North Pole without Arctic morphs-and wearing spandex?

Even so, the kids know if the Yeerks succeed with their plan, Earth is
pretty much done for. And Marco, the other Animorphs, and Ax aren't
quite ready to give up the fight... .

SCHOLASTIC INC.

RL5 009-012

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