Текст книги "Animorphs - 06 - The Capture"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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1 Animorphs Volume 06 The Capture K.A. Applegate *Converted to EBook by Dace K 2 Chapter One

I'm Jake.

Just Jake. You don't need to know my last name, and I can't tell you, anyway. My story is full of small lies. I've changed people's names. I've changed the names of places. I've changed small details here and there.

But the big stuff is true.

All of it.

The Yeerks are here. On Earth. That is true.

The Yeerks have made Controllers of many humans. They have inserted their gross, sluglike bodies into people's brains, and made them into slaves – Controllers. That is true.

Controllers are everywhere. My town. Your town. Everywhere.

They can be anyone. The policeman on the corner. The teacher in your school. Your best friend.

Your mother or father. Your brother.

I know. Because my brother Tom is one of them.

Tom is a Controller. A slave to the Yeerk in his head. If he knew who I really was – what I really was – he would have me killed. Or turned into a Controller, like him.

That's what my world is like now. A world where the enemy is everywhere. Even sitting across from me at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning, which is when this part of the story begins.

"Hey, midget, what's up?" Tom asked as I sat down. That's one of the things he calls me.

Actually I'm kind of big for my age. Almost as big as Tom. But it's a joke we've had for years.

You know how it is.

"Not much," I said. "What's up with you?"

"Oh, I'm going to a meeting."

"The Sharing?" I asked, trying to sound casual. The Sharing is this group that tries to pretend like it's some kind of combined Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. It's really a front organization for Controllers. The leadership council of The Sharing is made up of high-ranking Controllers.

"Yeah. We're doing some cleanup in the park.

You know, do our part for the community and all. Then we're having a barbecue afterward." He gave me a serious look. "You really should join, you know. We'd get to spend more time together."

3 I felt a wave of sickness. I tried not to show it. It wasn't Tom talking. It was the Yeerk in his head. The Yeerk who wanted to take my body and use it as a host for one of his fellow slugs.

As I sat there across the table from him, I was trying to decide something. I was trying to decide whether I would have to ever destroy him. Destroy my brother, who was not my brother. Not anymore.

"Maybe I will join some day," I said. Like when hell freezes over, I added silently. I poured myself some Wheaties and milk. "So you'll be out for a while?"

"All morning. Mom and Dad are out playing tennis, you'll have the house to yourself. Throw a party."

"Uh-huh," I said, and spooned up some cereal.

It was hard not to just yell at him. To let him know that I knew all about him. What he was. What he was doing.

At least, some of what he was doing. I had been spying on my brother. He was rising fast in the leadership of The Sharing. He was a very loyal Controller. The Yeerk in his head had been promoted.

And he was involved in some new plan. A very big new plan.

A plan I had to stop. Even if ...

"Well, take it easy, midget," Tom said, sounding just like he'd always sounded.

"You, too."

I waited till Tom was gone. I was alone. It was time.

I went through the house, room by room, making sure no one was there. Then I got the little matchbox I'd hidden in my desk drawer. I could hear a scrabbling noise coming from in side. I slid the matchbox open.

I shuddered.

It was a nice, big cockroach. Brown and glossy and about an inch long.

Its antennae waved eagerly. The roach tried to force its way out of the box, but I held my hand over it.

I could feel the roach antennae tickling the bottom of my palm. It was pushing, trying to get away.

I focused on the roach. Thought about it. Pictured it.

4 The roach stopped moving and lay still. Not dead, just quiet. The way animals always get when you "acquire" them.

I slid two fingers into the box to get a better contact with the roach. It felt hard and dry. I shuddered.

I absorbed the cockroach's DNA pattern. It was becoming part of me. The DNA – the genetic pattern – of many animals was a part of me now. Tiger. Dolphin. Flea. Falcon. Trout. Green anole lizard.

I have the power to morph. To become any animal that I can touch. The power was given to us, to me and my friends, by an Andalite prince moments before he was murdered by the Yeerks.

I have flown through the sky on my own out stretched wings at more than a hundred miles an hour. I have been a dolphin locked in deadly battle with sharks. I have felt the awesome power of the tiger, and experienced the terrible loss of self, the emptiness and horror of becoming an ant.

It was the gift of the dying Andalite. A powerful weapon for us to use in resisting the Yeerks.

It was also a dangerous, deadly curse. Like any weapon, I guess.

And now I was preparing to become a cock roach. It would be the ideal way to infiltrate The Sharing's new headquarters building. The leadership meeting was in a couple of days. I wanted to be there. But the Yeerks had grown cautious lately.

They knew we were out here. They believed, wrongly, that we were a group of Andalite warriors, but they knew that morph-capable enemies were hunting them. Opposing them.

Hurting them.

Sometimes hurting them very badly.

Tom. My brother. Could I destroy my own brother?

"You don't have to make that decision yet," I said aloud. "All you have to do now is try out this roach morph."

All I had to do now was become a cockroach.

Cockroaches are not my favorite animals. But I knew a cockroach would be ideal for penetrating a guarded building. Roaches can go any where.

You may have noticed that fact.

I put my dog, Homer, out in the yard. I closed the curtains in my bedroom, making it dark as possible.

5 "Oh, man, the things I do with my spare time," I muttered. I thought of calling Marco and asking him to come over. Marco is my best friend. He's the one who actually came up with the word "Animorph."

"No," I said. "Do this yourself."

The others were all tired. We'd had a rough time lately. Too many close calls. We needed a rest.

Time to deal with normal stuff, like school. Our grades had been suffering since we'd be come Animorphs.

Besides, this had to be my decision. Tom was my brother.

I took a deep breath. I braced myself. I took another deep breath.

"Okay, Jake," I said. "Let's do it."

The first mistake I made was standing in front of a full-length mirror.

It was dark in the room, but there was still enough light for me to see the changes.

Big mistake. Morphing is never pretty. It is always unpredictable. In fact, if you saw it happening and didn't know what was going on, you'd end up screaming for about two weeks straight.

The first feeling was of shrinking. It's exactly like falling. Like you're falling forever. I watched myself shrink in the mirror. It didn't look as bad in the mirror as it felt.

But what really did look bad was my skin as it began to be covered by an armor plate of brown cockroach shell.

"Aahhh!" I yelped in surprise.

My fingers melted together and formed a single, many-jointed bug leg. Antennae jumped out of my forehead. They seemed to stick out forever, then curl back, like they were being blown by a wind.

My waist was squeezed, and the lower part of my body swelled, forming a swollen insect abdomen. Swollen and brownish yellow with ripples, sort of like the Michelin man.

Then, when I was about a foot tall, I felt the last of my bones dissolve. I could actually hear it happening. My spine had been grinding as it shrank. Then, suddenly, I heard a squishy sound, as all my internal organs lost their bone support.

My skull melted away. It was the last sound I heard clearly, as my ears and human sense of hearing faded.

I was a bag of loose guts. Almost deaf. Half-blind, as my human eyes shrank and the lenses became distorted.

6 My exoskeleton got harder and stiffer and stronger. My wings, glossy and crisp, covered my back. They overlapped at the edges, like the metal plates of a suit of armor.

Extra legs suddenly sprouted from my chest. Only it wasn't exactly a chest anymore. I was a stunted, six-inch-long bug, with a few disintegrating strands of brown hair and shrunken, but still somewhat human, eyes.

Not attractive. Not even slightly.

Then I lost my eyes. It took a second to even realize that I could still see. Then, oh yes! Yes, I could see. But not the way I saw with human eyes.

A weird, wavy mountain seemed to wrap all around me – my clothes. They looked different, blue and green and gray. Kind of. It's hard to describe, exactly. I couldn't see very far, just a few feet.

And what I could see was shattered into dozens of little images. I saw little bits of vast fibrous walls – my socks. And dark tunnels made of thick slabs of what could have almost been wavy, corrugated concrete – the legs of my jeans.

The fibers of the carpet looked gray-green to me, and as big as ropes. My hairy, jointed roach legs would catch in the fibers as I tried to move.

I felt the roach brain surfacing. I'd been through it before. It's different each time, depending on the animal.

Sometimes it's a bunch of raw energy and fear that takes over your own mind so you think you're going crazy.

But not the roach brain. I didn't feel great hunger. I didn't feel great fear. The roach was . . . calm.

Confident. Unworried.

I laughed. I mean, in my head I laughed, be cause I no longer had a mouth or a throat or any thing at all that would make a laugh.

I was so tensed up, expecting the cockroach to be a bundle of energy and fear. But mostly it just felt like resting.

The roach brain wanted to take a nap.

Cool, I thought. It's gross. It's disgusting. Marco and the others will hate the idea, but when I tell them how easy it is to handle – VIBRATION!

Get ready. Get ready. What was it? Get ready.

LIGHT! LIGHT! LIGHT!

7 Chapter 2

RUN! Run from the LIGHT!

Imagine being in one of those race cars at the Indianapolis 500.

Now imagine that instead of sitting in one, you are strapped facedown underneath one. Your nose is about a tenth of an inch from the road and you're going 180 miles an hour.

That's what it was like when I ran. My roach legs powered like something from a Roadrunner cartoon. I blew out from under the folds of my own clothing. I blew across that carpet. I was rocket-propelled.

Someone had put the light on in my room. And when that light came on, my roach brain stopped being calm and relaxed.

Zoooom! Three miles an hour. That's very fast when you're only an inch long.

Vibration . . . vibration . . . vibration . . .

Heavy steps rattled the floor. They vibrated up through my legs. My tiny roach brain knew what they meant. Something very, very big was walking around.

Chasing me! RUN!

Zoom! across the carpet. Suddenly, a wall!

Up? Left? Right? Which way?

Vibration . . . vibration . . . vibration . . .

Wait! A crack. It wasn't much of a crack. Just enough space to slip a quarter through. No way I could fit.

Or could I?

My underside scraped the floor. My hard brown wing cover scraped the bottom of the baseboard.

But I barely had to slow down.

I was in the wall! Hah! The big things that rattled the floor would never catch me now. I was safe here. A nail as thick as a tree trunk stuck up from the wood. I went around it.

On either side of me I saw bright, straight lines of light that seemed to go on forever. They were the cracks beneath the baseboards. To one side a thick, shiny slab with irregular edges intruded into the wall – the edge of the kitchen linoleum.

High above I could see other lights, more circular and dimmer. These were the holes where pipes entered the wall.

8 AHHHH!

Something moving! Close by. Oh, gross! A cockroach!

Get a grip, Jake! I told myself. You're a cock roach, too! But still, you just don't want to be face-to-face with a roach as big as you are. I mean, he was right at eye level. The other roach's antennae felt me, sweeping over me, tangling briefly with my antennae.

We said "hi." At least, we said the roach ver sion of "hi." Which wasn't really "hello." It was more like, "Oh, you're a roach, too."

Now, in the darkness inside the wall, I felt calmer. The electric fear was gone. The suddenness of the light had been the problem. That and the vibration.

I could still feel the vibrations, but they were different now. Further away.

Okay, I'd had enough of being a roach. It was time to get to some safe place, demorph and find out who had been in my room.

Why was someone in my room? A few minutes earlier, and they would have caught me in mid-morph. Stupid of me. Stupid, stupid.

Where could I go to demorph? The garage? Yes, the garage. There weren't any mirrors, and I sure didn't want to watch myself morph again.

Through the kitchen, out under the back door; that was the way.

I went to the bright crack ahead of me, the kitchen. I scampered up on the ledge of linoleum. I stuck my head and antennae out beneath the baseboard. The vibrations were all far away. In some other room.

I emerged from the crack. Over my head was an incredibly high canyon. It went up and up, far higher than I could see. Two parallel walls, just a few body lengths apart. Of course. The refrigerator. I was behind the refrigerator. One side of the "canyon" was the kitchen wall, the other side was the back of the refrigerator.

Someone really should sweep back here. There were dust bunnies the size of couches.

But no problem. I was getting the hang of it now. Follow the baseboard. To the next wall. Turn right, and then there would be the door.

No problem. I was in charge.

Some big barnlike structure was ahead of me. It looked like one of those old-fashioned covered bridges.

Huh. Probably an old matchbox.

9 I went in, trotting along on my six jointed legs.

Wait. I wasn't moving anymore.

What the . . . ?

I tried to run.

I was stuck!

I tried again. One leg was free, but the others were frozen in place. What was ... I felt around with my antennae.

Now my antennae were stuck!

I couldn't move. I couldn't move at all!

I was trapped!

10 Chapter 3

So?" Rachel demanded. "What was it? How did you get trapped?"

"I'll bet I know," Marco said, grinning sardonically, which is the only way he knows how to grin.

"Jake checked in, but he couldn't check out."

I nodded. "Roach Motel. I walked into a stupid Roach Motel. I ran right onto the sticky paper and, man, I could not move. Very frustrating."

"You know, you could do commercials for the Roach Motel company," Marco suggested. "Take it from me, Roach Boy, these things really work."

It was later in the day, and we were in Cassie's barn. Rachel, Marco, Tobias, Cassie, and me. As usual, the place was filled with wire cages, and the cages were filled with animals. Rabbits, foxes, baby deer, eagles, opossums, mourning doves, all of them injured or sick. Some of them feisty and ready to be released.

We were lounging around on bales of hay and piles of feed sacks. All except Tobias, who was up in the rafters high overhead, and Cassie, who was feeding some of the animals.

Everyone seemed to think my roach experiment was funny.

Except for Cassie. Cassie was the only one not smiling. She was giving me a very disapproving look. "Jake, you of all people should know better."

She was right. I knew she was right. But that just made me stubborn.

"Look, I was just trying out the morph to see if it would be good for us to use."

Cassie totally did not buy my argument. She put down the bucket she was carrying. She took off her heavy work gloves. She came over and stood about a foot from me. Then she stuck her finger in my face.

"Uh-oh," Marco said in a loud whisper. "Jake's in trouble."

"Big time," Rachel agreed.

"Jake," Cassie said, "don't ever do that again. Now, you are sort of the one in charge, but I am telling you, don't ever do that again. Don't ever try some new morph without one of us there. Do you understand?"

"Cassie, I was just – "

"Uh-uh. No. Don't tell me what you were just. Don't ever do that again."

"Um, Jake? I think this is the point where you just say 'yes, ma'am,'" Tobias said, in the thought-speak that comes with being in a morph.

11 I hung my head. "Okay, Cassie. Sorry."

Rachel whistled appreciatively. "It's a new, tougher Cassie. I approve."

"I remember when she used to be so sweet," Marco said. "I didn't know her voice could even sound like that. Plus, look! She now comes with a Kung Fu grip."

Cassie ignored them. Instead she gave me a private look, just between the two of us. I knew what the look meant. It meant I care about you. Don't be dumb.

And the look I sent her meant I know. I care about you, too.

Okay, I realize it sounds corny. But give me a break. We'd been through a lot, Cassie and I. And all of us. We'd grown pretty close.

To me, Cassie is an amazing person. For one thing, she handles all kinds of responsibility. Her barn is actually the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic. Her parents are both veterinarians and her dad runs the clinic as a way to help injured wild animals. Everything from seagulls to skunks. And Cassie helps with all the work, except for doing surgery. But I'll bet she could do that, too.

As for how she looks, well, she's very pretty. Kind of short. She only comes up to my chin, but then, I'm fairly tall. But she's not one of those wimpy-looking short girls, you know? Not all prissy. She's strong-looking. Mostly, when I picture Cassie, I think of her wearing overalls and boots because of working in the barn so much.

I guess most guys would say Rachel is prettier. Personally, I don't think of her that way be cause she's my cousin. But Rachel does look like some kind of blond supermodel.

Not that Rachel acts like Ms. Fashion. Just the opposite. If there's danger, Rachel is right there.

Usually a few steps ahead of anyone else.

Marco says Rachel's enjoying it all. That she's actually glad about all that's happened in our lives since that night when we saw the Andalites' damaged spaceship land in the construction site.

Marco refers to Rachel as Xena, Warrior Princess.

But that's Marco. For him, everything is a joke. Except for his family. Or what's left of it.

Marco is small, with dark eyes and dark, long brown hair. Cassie says a lot of the girls at school think he's cute. I wouldn't know.

Most of the time Marco and I totally do not get along. He says I'm too serious. Personally, I think he's just a little too immature sometimes.

We disagree about everything. He actually tries to tell me that college hoops are better than the NBA. Yeah, right! Please. What are you going to do with a guy like that?

We get on each other's nerves a lot of the time.12 We're also best friends and have been since we were babies. I would do almost anything for Marco, and he would do the same for me. Of course, he'd complain the whole time. Oh, man, can that guy complain when he wants to.

The last member of our original group is To bias. Tobias used to be this kind of sweet guy with wild blond hair. A dreamy sort of person with a really terrible home life.

Used to be.

I glanced up at him. He was perched on a rafter overhead. He was preening his wing feath ers, carefully combing them out with his beak.

It's an amazing beak. It has a wicked, cruel– looking hook at the end – the better to tear open the mice and rats and other small animals he eats.

Tobias is a red-tailed hawk. I guess maybe he will always be a red-tailed hawk.

See, there's one problem with morphing. A time limit of two hours. If you stay in morph more than two hours, you stay forever.

Which is why Rachel asked me, "So? What's the rest of the story? How did you get out of the Roach Motel before the time was up? I notice you are human again."

"More or less," Marco added.

I shrugged. "Well, I sat there for a while, trying to squirm .out, but it didn't work. I was stuck good. But it was okay, because as I sat there I realized I could start to make sense of some of the vibrations I was hearing. Some of it was sound. People speaking."

"What people?" Marco asked.

"My parents. My dad twisted his ankle playing tennis, which is why they'd come home early.

They were the ones who'd gone into my room, looking for the Ace bandage I have in my drawer.

They were the ones who'd turned on the light. Anyway, what could I do? I wasn't about to get stuck in roach morph. And I could tell my parents were up in their bedroom. So I demorphed."

"Wait. Weren't you behind the refrigerator?" Tobias asked in thought-speak.

"Yeah. And it was very tight. But as I grew, I could push the refrigerator out an inch at a time.

Still, I thought I was going to suffocate back there. And then, just as I was getting human again, my mom walks in."

That made them all lean forward.

"What?" Cassie demanded. "Your mom? What did she see? What did she say?"

13 "Well, all she could see was my head. It was normal, fortunately. And what she asked me was, 'Jake? Why are you back there? And while we're at it, why do you have the top of a Roach Motel stuck in your hair?'"

Everyone got a good laugh out of that image.

Marco was the first to stop laughing. He was looking at me kind of sideways. The way he does when he thinks I'm hiding something.

"Very funny and all, Jake," Marco said. "But you haven't told us why you were morphing a roach. And don't give me that 'I was just trying it out' routine."

I stopped laughing. Sooner or later I would have to tell them. I would have to tell them every thing.

"Okay. Look, I've learned something. For one thing, Tom is getting more important to the Yeerks. I think now he's just below Chapman as a Controller."

Rachel gave a low whistle.

Chapman is our assistant principal at school. He is also the most important Controller we know about.

"Tom is careful about not letting my parents or me overhear anything suspicious," I said. "But he does make phone calls using our phone some times. I've been checking the automatic redial when he's done. So I know some of the people he's calling."

Marco laughed. "Cool. Jake the superspy. Nice trick."

"And who is Tom calling?" Tobias asked.

"Doctors. Five different doctors. I looked them up in the phone book. They all practice at the same hospital. The same wing of the hospital, at something called the Berman Clinic. Berman is one of the doctors Tom calls."

It took a few minutes for the facts to sink in.

"Wait a minute," Rachel said. "Are you saying the Yeerks are running that hospital? Or at least a part of that hospital? Why would they want a hospital?"

I hesitated before answering. I wasn't sure my guess was right. Maybe I was just being paranoid.

But Marco, who could teach a class in paranoia, had already figured it out, of course.

"Oh, man. They're going to use the hospital to infest host bodies. You check in to have your tonsils out or to have a cast put on your broken arm. You check out as a Controller."

14 Chapter 4

Tom came home late that evening. He smelled like wood smoke and barbecue sauce.

My mom and dad and I were already at the table, eating dinner. My dad had his injured ankle resting on a stool. We were having broiled chicken and potatoes and veggies.

As he walked in through the kitchen door, my mom said, "Tom, how was the big cleanup? They showed some of it on the news."

Tom came into the dining room and took a chair across from me. "It was okay. We filled two Dumpsters full of garbage and dead branches and stuff. Hey, what happened to your leg, old man?"

My dad winced. "I tried for a shot I shouldn't have tried for. Twisted it."

"Did you have enough to eat?" my mom asked Tom.

Tom patted his stomach. "Burgers and dogs and chicken. Not as good as your chicken, of course."

"Actually, your father cooked. He cooked by calling Gourmet Express and having it delivered."

"But I did microwave the sauce," my dad said. "That counts as cooking."

Tom winked at my dad. "Well, the stuff at the barbecue had to be better than dad's chicken.

Good thing I ate there."

"Just for that you get no dessert," my dad said. "And it's cheesecake. From Santorini's."

"Oooh, Santorini's?" Tom groaned. "I take it back. I apologize. I grovel. I beg. I love Santorini's."

Homer came in, sensing it was time for table scraps. "Hey, Homer," Tom said. He scratched him behind the ears and Homer got his happy– moron look, the look where his eyes glaze over and his tongue lolls out of his mouth.

A totally normal scene. Around a totally normal dinner table. No one would ever have guessed the truth. In my brother's head was an alien. A creature from another planet.

I asked Ax about how it works. Ax is the Andalite we rescued from the bottom of the ocean. He's one of us now, I guess.

Anyway, I asked Ax about how the Yeerk slug lives in a person's head. He'd explained it to me.

How they can flatten their sluglike bodies. How they can sink between the crevices and cracks of a person's brain. How they melt like a liquid into every available space. How they wrap their bodies around a brain and attach their own neurons to human neurons.

15 Tom must have noticed me staring at him.

"What's your malfunction?"

I snapped out of my daze. "What? Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of something."

"You were staring at me. You were staring at my forehead."

I forced a laugh. My mind raced to think of a joke. "Really? I thought I was just staring blankly into empty space. But then again, empty space, your head. What's the difference?"

It worked. Tom snatched up a dinner roll and chucked it at me. I caught it in midair a split second before it would have hit my face.

For a moment we just glared at each other.

"Don't throw food," my dad said. "It's undignified."

"It's okay," I said. "Tom's not fast enough to hit me anymore. He's slowed down. Lost his touch."

Tom raised an eyebrow. "Don't push it, midget."

I smiled. It was a fake smile, but it was the best I could do. "You used to be faster when you were still on the basketball team. I guess hanging out at The Sharing all the time, eating barbecue and potato salad, must have slowed your reflexes."

You know, in the old days, Tom would not have put up with that. He would not have let me challenge him and get away with it. He would have had me in a headlock and given me a massive noogie till I begged for mercy.

But now he just gave me a cold, uncertain smile.

Maybe it was because he had changed. Maybe it was because I had changed. The silence stretched between us for a few minutes, and my parents, feeling uncomfortable, made small talk.

"I have homework to do," I said at last. "May I be excused?"

"Come back down for cheesecake later," my mom said.

Tom caught up to me on the stairs. "I don't know why you're so against The Sharing," he said. "A lot of the kids in your school have joined."

"I guess I just don't like to join things."

"Yeah? Well, don't dump on what you don't understand. What were you doing that was so important today? While I was out cleaning up the park?"

16 I stopped and turned to face him. I was one step higher than he was. We were eye to eye. "Me? I wasn't doing much of anything. Hanging out with Marco."

"Your loss," he said. "There are things that are cooler than hanging out with Marco. Cooler than being on some bogus team. Important things. You could be a part of something . . . bigger. You could be part of something great, not just another nothing kid."

He gave me a look. Like he could tell me incredible things. Like he could open up a whole new world for me.

I could be part of something bigger. Some thing important.

I knew that kind of stuff worked on some people. That was the first step toward becoming a voluntary host. That was how The Sharing started you out: talk of bigger, more glorious, more interesting things that you could be part of.

"Thanks, Tom," I said. "But I don't want to be a part. I guess I'd rather just be one person. On my own. One little nothing kid."

For a split second after I said that, he let the mask slip. For just a moment I saw an expression of pure arrogance and contempt. Yeerk arrogance. Yeerk contempt.

The look said "We will have you, sooner or later. You and all the rest of your weak race."

Then it was gone, and Tom was shrugging like it was all no big deal.

I went to my room. I did some homework. Later, I went back downstairs and ate cheese cake along with my folks and my brother. One big happy family watching TV and pigging out.

That night, I had the dream.

A dream that had begun to appear almost every night.

17 Chapter 5

"I can't believe we are actually going to practice a morph," Marco said. "We never practice. We just do it, and when it's a huge disaster we try and deal with it then."

"We need the practice," I pointed out. "We're going in as spies. We're going to this thing to try and hear what they are saying. And it takes a while to learn how to use the cockroach's senses to understand sound."

"This would be a great horror movie. Or at least a book," Marco said. "Roachman."

We were in Marco's new apartment. It was the first time we'd ever used it. Probably because now that Marco's dad was back at work, they had moved to a better place. I guess Marco used to be embarrassed over his old place.

In fact, his dad was out, working late at his new job. I hoped the job would last. Marco had been carrying a big load of family problems for a long time.

"Is it possible to die of total willies?" Cassie asked. "I mean, do you think we could someday just gross ourselves right out of existence? I didn't even like touching a cockroach. How am I going to stand becoming one?"

"Just don't be near a mirror," I suggested. "And don't look at each other while you're morphing."

"Are these creatures frightening to humans?" Ax wondered.

It's amazing how quickly we'd all gotten used to the fact that this guy from another planet was with us. I barely even thought about the fact that an Andalite was standing there, looking like a cross between a blue deer, a mouthless human, a goat with eyes on the ends of his horns, and a scorpion.

The scorpion part is the Andalite's tail. It has a curved, scythe blade on the end. The Andalites can whip that tail forward so fast you don't even see it move.