Текст книги "Animorphs - 03 - The Encounter"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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1 Animorphs Volume 03 The Encounter K.A. Applegate *Converted to EBook by Dace K 2 Chapter 1

My name is Tobias. A freak of nature. One of a kind.

I won't tell you my last name. I can't tell you my last name. Or the name of the city where I live.

I want to tell you everything, but I can't give any clues to my true identity. Or the identity of the others. Everything I will tell you is true. I Know it's going to seem unbelievable, but believe it anyway.

I am Tobias. I'm a normal kid, I guess. Or used to be. I used to do okay in school. Not great, but not bad either. Just okay.

I guess I was a dweeb, kind of. Big, but not big enough to keep from getting picked on. I had blond hair, kind of wild because I could never get it to look right. My eyes were . . . what color were my eyes? It's only been a few weeks, and already I'm forgetting things about being human.

I guess it doesn't matter, anyway. My eyes now are gold and brown. I have eyes that look fierce and angry all the time. I'm not always fierce or angry, but I look that way.

One afternoon, I was riding the thermals, the upswelling hot air. I rode them way up into the sky. The bottoms of low clouds, heavy with moisture, scudded just a few feet above me.

I looked down and focused my laserlike eyes. My fierce eyes, I could still read – I hadn't forgotten how to do that. I could see the big red-and-white sign that said: DEALIN' DAN HAWKE'S USED CARS.

I pressed my wings back, closer to my body, and began to fall.

Down, down, down! Faster. Faster!

I fell through the warm, early evening air like a rock. Like an artillery shell falling toward its target.

All was silent except for the sound of the air rushing over the tops of my wings. The ground came up at me. It came up like it was trying to hit me.

I saw the cage. It was no more than three feet on each side. In the cage was a hawk. A red-tail.

Like me.

The man was close by. I recognized him because I had seen him on his TV commercials. He was Dealin' Dan Hawke. He owned the car dealership.

He was the one holding the hawk prisoner.

She was a mascot. On the commercials he called her Price-Cut Polly. It made me sick. It made me furious.

I saw the camera. There were three guys standing around. They would be shooting a live commercial soon. I didn't care.

3 Dealin' Dan went to the hawk's cage to feed her. It was locked with a bike-style combination lock. Four numbers. I could see them as he turned the combination. 8-1-2-5.

I was two hundred yards up, plummeting to earth at seventy miles an hour. But I could see the numbers as he turned them. And the human part of me, Tobias, could remember.

He opened the cage and tossed in some food. Then he closed it again and spun the lock.

Brilliant lights came on. He was starting the commercial. It would be live on TV all over the area.

What I was planning was insane. That's what Marco would have said. It was one of his favorite words. Insane.

I didn't care.

A hawk was in a tiny cage, being used as a prop for some lowlife car dealer. That wasn't going to go on. Not if I could help it.

"Tseeeeeeeer!" I screamed.

Twenty feet from the ground, I opened my wings. The strain was terrible. I absorbed most of the momentum and used the rest for speed. I shot across the parked cars to the cage.

I landed on the bars and grabbed on with my talons.

I used the hook of my deadly sharp beak to click the first number into place.

"Hey! What the – " someone yelled.

The bright TV light focused right on me.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen in TV-land," Dealin' Dan yapped in surprise, "I guess we have a bird trying to break into our Price-Cut Polly's cage. Boys, you better shoo him away."

Yeah, right. Shoo me, I thought.

I clicked the second number. There were people coming for me. I saw a mechanic swinging a long steel wrench. But I wasn't going to leave without freeing this bird.

Hawks do not belong in cages. Hawks belong in the sky.

But they were all around me.

"Get him, Earl! Hit the thing!"

"Look out for that beak of his!"

"Maybe he's got rabies!"

WHAM!

4 The mechanic swung the wrench! It barely missed my head. I was dead if I didn't get some help.

Fast.

"Rachel?" I cried silently with my mind. "Rachel? Now would be a good time!"

"Sorry! I missed the first bus. I just got here!" Her voice was in my head. We call it thought-speak. It's something we can do when we morph.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Help was on the way.

"HhhuuuurrHHHHEEEEEAAAAH!"

"What in the world was – " the mechanic cried.

I knew what it was. It was Rachel. Pretty, blond Rachel. Although right at the moment she wasn't pretty – impressive, but not pretty.

BOOM! Cr-u-u-u-nch!

"Oh. My. Lord," Dealin' Dan gasped. "Forget the bird! There's an elephant stomping over the convertibles!"

I would have smiled. If I'd had a mouth.

I finished turning the lock. I yanked open the cage door.

The hawk was wary. She was a true hawk, with only a hawk's mind and instincts to guide her. But she did know an open path to the sky when she saw one.

Out she came, in a rush of gray and brown and white feathers. She didn't know that I had freed her. That kind of concept was beyond her thinking. And she felt no gratitude.

But she flapped her wings and rose into the air.

Free.

And right then I had the strangest feeling. Like I should go with her. Like I should be with her.

"Can we get out of here now?" Rachel asked.

She was bellowing loudly, tossing her big trunk around and stomping various cars. Having a very good time, by elephant standards. But it was time for us to leave. For, Rachel to resume her human form.

I looked up again. I saw the sunlight shine through the hawk's red tail. She flew toward the setting sun.

5 CHAPTER 2

"I hear sirens," I said urgently.

"I hear them, too," Rachel snapped. "I have ears the size of quilts. You think I can't hear them? I'm morphing as fast as I can."

"I just hope it's real cops. Not Controllers."

We had reached a patch of woods behind Dealin' Dan's car dealership. It was really just a few scruffy trees between the car place and a convenience store.

I watched from a low tree branch as Rachel morphed back to human again. If you've never seen someone morph, you have no idea just how incredibly weird it is.

When she began, she was a full-grown African elephant. Ten feet tall. Almost twice that from head to tail. She weighed at least six thousand pounds. I say "at least" because we've never exactly tried to stick her on the bathroom scale.

She had two curved tusks, each about as long as a child. And a trunk that dragged the ground when she walked and could pick up a big slashing, yelling, dangerously angry Hork-Bajir warrior and throw him twenty feet.

I'd seen her do it.

"Tobias, you could at least have waited till he was done broadcasting that commercial.

Thousands of people saw that on TV! Thousands!"

"Most people will figure it was some kind of a stunt or a trick," I said.

"Most people, maybe. But not Controllers. Any Controllers who happened to be watching will guess right away that we were not just animals."

Controllers. There's a word you need to know. A Controller is anyone with a Yeerk in his head. Yeerks are alien parasites. They are evil little slugs who live in the bodies of other species and enslave them. All the Hork-Bajir are Controllers. So are the Taxxons.

So are more and more humans. Human-Controllers.

As I watched, Rachel began to shrink. The ropy tail was sucked up like a piece of spaghetti.

Her trunk grew smaller.

Blond hair began to sprout from her massive gray forehead. Her eyes wandered across her face toward the middle. The vast leathery ears became pink and small and perfectly formed.

"The others are going to ream us out big time, aren't they?" I said.

"Oh, yes. I think we can count on that."

"It was my idea. I'll take the blame."

6 "Oh, shut up, Tobias. Stop being all noble. Besides, it was amazing fun stomping those cars!"

She was small enough now that she could stand on her hind legs. As she did, her front legs grew smooth and human. Her back legs lost their clunkiness and became her own long, coltish legs.

Her morphing clothes, a skintight black leotard, emerged.

The tusks shlooped back into her mouth and divided into sparkling teeth. She was a very pretty girl, beautiful even, except that she still had a two-foot-long gray nose.

At last the trunk seemed to roll up and became a regular nose.

She was a girl again. Barefoot, because no one had figured out how to morph shoes. Her mouth was back to normal. She spoke in her normal voice, no longer in my head. Thought-speech is only for morphs.

"Okay, I'm back. Let's bail!"

The siren sounds were coming ever closer. "Head for the convenience store. I'll go up and look around."

"I hope they have some flip-flops for sale in there," Rachel grumbled. "This shoe situation is a pain."

The elephant was gone. The girl had emerged.

See? I told you it would be hard to believe.

It began at a deserted construction site, when we found the crashed spaceship of an Andalite prince. He was the last surviving Andalite in our solar system. He and his fellow Andalites had fought a great battle to drive away the Yeerk mother ship.

They fought and lost.

And now the Yeerks are among us. And they are now trying to enslave the human race.

Before he died at the hands of the Yeerk leader, a terrible creature called Visser Three, the Andalite gave us a great gift – and a great curse.

The gift was the power to morph. To absorb the DNA of any living animal and to become that animal. Never before had anyone but the Andalites themselves been given the power to morph.

It meant a life of secrets. Of terrible danger.

The Yeerks think we are a small band of escaped Andalites. They know that morphs had attacked their Yeerk pool. They know that morphs had even infiltrated the home of one of their most important Controllers – Chapman.

But they don't know that we are just five normal human kids who'd been walking home from the mall one night.

7 Visser Three wants us caught or dead. Visser Three usually gets what he wants.

But I was glad to fight the Yeerks. Maybe I just had less to lose than the others. Or maybe something about the lonely, defeated, yet courageous Andalite prince touched me so deeply that I could never regret fighting to settle the score.

But there has been a price to pay. You see, there is a limit on the power to morph. You must never remain in a morph for more than two hours. If you do, you are trapped.

Forever.

And that is the curse of the Andalite's gift.

That is why, when Rachel returned to her human body, I didn't.

It would take Rachel a while to get home on the bus. I traveled a little faster. So I had time to waste.

The sun was setting, and in my mind I could still picture the freed hawk heading into the sun.

I hoped she had found a nice patch of forest to spend the night. That's what a red-tail likes: a nice tree branch with a clear view of a meadow full of little mice and rats and shrews and voles as they scurry below. That's how we . . . they . . . hunt.

I headed toward the tall buildings of downtown. I caught a beautiful thermal that billowed up the face of some skyscrapers. A thermal is like a big bubble of warm air. It rises beneath your wings and makes it effortless to just go soaring up and up.

I caught the thermal and went shooting up the side of the skyscraper like I was riding an elevator.

A lot of the offices were empty, since it was Saturday. But around the sixtieth floor I saw an old man looking out the window. Maybe he was some big, important businessman, I don't know.

But when he saw me he smiled. He watched me soar up and away. And I knew he was jealous.

I was half a mile up when I finally turned away from the sun and headed toward Rachel's house.

The sun was going down. The moon just peeked over the rim of the world.

Then, I felt . . . I don't know how to describe it. It was in the air above me. Huge. Vast!

Bigger than any jet.

I looked up. But there was nothing there.

And yet, I felt it in my heart. I knew it was up there. Coming toward me, but perhaps a mile higher than me.

I focused all the power of my hawk's eyes on the sky.

A ripple!

8 That's what it was. A ripple. Like the ripple you make throwing a stone into a calm pond. The faint twilight stars flickered as it passed by. The sun's light bent. And for Just a split second I was sure I could see . . . something.

But no. No. It was gone.

If it had ever really been there.

I tried to follow the hole in the sky, but it was moving too fast. I tried to see which way it was going. And where it had come from. It seemed to be moving away from the mountains and picking up speed.

But I lost it over the suburbs as it accelerated away.

I flew on to Rachel's house. I watched as she got off the bus far below me. The others, Jake, Marco, and Cassie, were all up in her room, waiting for us. I was not surprised.

"Hey, Rachel," I said, floating above her.

She could only wave up at me. You can "hear" thought-speak when you're human, but you can't make thought-speech.

"I predict Marco's first words will be "Are you insane?"" I told Rachel.

She gave me a little wink.

Rachel went in through the front door. I flew in an open window. There we were, all together, the five of us: the Animorphs.

The other three of us must have seen the commercial and were not at all happy. – Marco started the conversation.

"Are you INSANE?!!" he said.

9 CHAPTER 3

Marco yelled for a while. Jake made us promise never to do something that stupid again. And Cassie, being Cassie, got everyone to make up and be friends again.

"We aren't supposed to be rescuing animals," Marco said. "We're supposed to be rescuing the entire human race from being enslaved by the Yeerks."

"I thought you didn't want to save the world, Marco," I pointed out.

He scowled at me. But there's no point in scowling at me. With my face I can out-scowl anyone.

"You're right," Marco said. "But since all of you guys think you have to save the world, and since you're all my friends, more or less, I figure someone has to keep you from being total idiots."

Marco is the most reluctant of the Animorphs. Although actually he's the one who came up with the word "Animorph." And he's been in with us from the start. Marco just thinks we should look out for ourselves and our own families.

Marco and I will probably never be very close. He's a typical smart-aleck kind of guy.

Always confident. Always has some funny or sarcastic thing to say. He's short, or at least he's not very tall. I guess girls think he's cute because he has this long brown hair and dark eyes.

Jake grinned at Marco. "So you're the one who has to rescue all of us from being idiots?"

"Boy, if Marco's the sensible one, we're all in serious trouble," Rachel said.

Everyone laughed.

Jake gave Marco an affectionate punch in the shoulder. "Just the same, it's nice of you to want to save us all. It's almost sweet"

Marco made a face and grabbed one of Rachel's pillows to throw at Jake.

Marco and Jake are absolute opposites, although they've been buds forever. Jake is big. Not football-player big, but solid. Jake is one of those people who are natural leaders. If you were ever trapped in a burning building, you would turn to Jake and ask, "What do we do?" And he would have an answer, too.

You can tell he and Rachel are cousins. They're both kind of determined people.

"I have to get going," Cassie said. "I have horses to feed and birdcages to clean."

"Don't say the word 'cage' around Tobias," Marco said. "He'll do some guerrilla-commando-Ninja-SWAT-team-hawk-from-hell attack on the Center. And he'll talk Rachel into stomping your house flat."

Everyone laughed, because we all knew why Cassie had birdcages. Her father and mother are both veterinarians. Her mom works for The Gardens, which is this huge zoo and amusement park.

10 Her dad runs the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in the barn on their family farm. The Center takes in wild animals that are sick or hurt and cares for them.

The cages Cassie had to get home to clean were filled with sparrows with broken wings and eagles who'd been shot and seagulls who'd gotten tangled in trash.

Cassie is our expert on animals. She also gets us access to animals to morph. She's a gentle person. She can also morph better than any of us.

Everyone stood up and started to go.

"You coming, Tobias?" Jake asked me.

"No, not right away. I think I'll fly around. It's a nice night"

"Cool," he said. "I'll put some food up in your attic for you in case you get home late. I don't want anything getting at it, though. Can you open one of those Rubbermaid things?"

I saw the way the others kind of looked away when Jake mentioned the attic. They feel sorry for me.

"I can get it open," I said. "Just be careful. You know – Tom." Tom is Jake's big brother. Tom is one of them.

Everyone said good night. I saw Cassie and Jake touch their hands together in a way that could almost have been accidental. Then they were all gone. All but me and Rachel.

"I don't like thinking of you living in a cold attic," Rachel said.

"I'm okay," I said. I wondered if I should tell her what I had seen, the darkness within darkness, the hole in the sky. But the truth was, even I didn't know what it was.

It would just worry her. And she worried about me too much.

"Good night," I said.

"Yeah. Take care of yourself, Tobias."

I flew out through her window into the night. Rachel's sad eyes seemed to follow me. I hated the way they all felt sorry for me. All they could see was that I was not what I used to be. All they saw was that I had no home.

But they didn't really understand. I hadn't had a real home since my parents died. I was used to being alone. ' And I had the sky.

11 Chapter 4

The next day I decided to go back to where I had seen – or not seen – the big thing in the sky.

I had a feeling about it. A bad feeling.

I flew up over the same area, rising as high as I could on the thermals.

Hawks are not quite as good at soaring as eagles or some buzzards are. (Man, you should see the way a turkey buzzard can work those thermals! Awesome.) And actually, the red-tail hawk in my head would be just as happy perched patiently on the branch of a tree, waiting to see its next meal go scurrying past.

But I didn't eat like a hawk. I ate food that Jake gave me. I didn't hunt. Although sometimes the urge to hunt was pretty strong.

I could just hear Marco making some smart crack about me eating mice. Or roadkill.

When you're in a morph, it's hard to resist the animal's instincts. Jake found that out when he became a lizard. He glomped down a live spider before he got control of the lizard's instincts.

I hadn't done that. Yet. I was afraid if I did it once, I'd never be able to stop.

I soared high above the city, over the area I'd been through the day before. But nothing.

Nothing moved in the air above me.

Then it occurred to me: Whatever it was, maybe it only happened at certain times of day. It had been almost sunset when I'd felt its presence last.

I decided to come back around sunset. Which meant I had the whole day ahead of me with nothing special to do. This did not make me happy. See, the fact is, a hawk spends almost all its time hunting food.

As for me, Tobias, when I hadn't been in school, I used to spend most of my free time watching TV, hanging out at the mall, doing homework, reading . . . all things it was difficult for me to do, now.

I missed school. Even though I had constantly been picked on by bullies. I didn't really miss my home, though. See, when my parents died, there was no one who really wanted me. I ended up getting shunted back and forth between an uncle here and an aunt across the country.

Neither of them really cared about me. I don't think they even missed me. I had arranged for Jake to leave a message with my uncle. We told him I had gone to stay with my aunt. Each of them, my uncle and my aunt, thought I was staying with the other.

I had no idea how long that trick would hold up before one of them figured out I wasn't in either place.

I guess when they realize it they'll call the cops and report me as a runaway. Or maybe they won't even bother.

12 So. What was I going to do with my day? I'd been floating up here in the high air, just below the clouds, for a couple of hours. It was time to give it up and try again another time.

I tilted my wings and adjusted my tail, turning toward Rachel's house. Maybe she would be hanging around the house, bored.

Then it happened.

A mile or more above me, the ripple passed through the air. An emptiness, a hole where no hole could be.

I reacted instantly. I had to get closer.

I flapped till my chest and shoulders were sore. But it was moving too fast, and it was too high.

It pulled away from me, a wave of air, a rippling of the fabric of the sky. It was moving in a different direction, though. It was moving toward the mountains.

Then . . . a flight of geese on the move in a tight V-formation.

There were maybe a dozen of the big, determined geese, moving along at an amazing rate, powering their way through the air like they always do. Geese always seem to be on a mission. Like, "Get out of our way, we're geese and we're coming through."

The geese were aimed straight for the disturbance.

Suddenly, the lead goose folded like it had been hit by a truck. Its wings collapsed. But it did not fall.

The crippled goose slid through the air. It slid horizontally, rolling and flopping like it was passing over the top of a racing train.

Most of the other geese suffered the same fate. One or two peeled away in time, but geese are not real agile.

The invisible wave smacked into the flight, and the geese were crushed. They were rolling and sliding along some unseen but solid surface.

And everywhere the geese hit, I could catch little glimpses of steel-gray metal.

The wave passed by. The geese fell in its wake, dead or crippled.

It flew on, unconcerned. But then, why should the Yeerks care about a handful of geese?

And that's what they were, I was certain. Yeerks.

What I had seen, or not quite seen, was a Yeerk ship.

13 CHAPTER 5

"It figures," Marco said thoughtfully. "The Yeerks would have to have some kind of cloaking ability. Like 'stealth' technology, only much better."

We are all in Cassie's barn. Her dad was away for the afternoon. And it's one of the few places where I can go and not look out of place. "

It's a regular old-fashioned barn, but with rows of clean cages and fluorescent lights. There are partitions keeping the birds away from the horses, and more partitions keeping the raccoons and opossums and the occasional coyote away from the skittish horses. The floor of the barn is usually strewn with hoses and buckets and scattered hay. There are charts on each cage showing the condition of the animal and what treatment it's getting.

It's usually a pretty noisy place, what with various birds chirping or cooing, horses snuffling, and raccoons fussing with their food.

I looked over a little nervously at a pair of wolves, one male, one female. One had been shot.

The other had eaten poison left out by a farmer. Wolves were new in the area. Wildlife experts had brought some back to the nearby forest.

Wolves make hawks a little edgy.

"We were always able to see Yeerk ships," Rachel pointed out. "We saw the Bug fighters and the Blade ship." She was leaning against a cage that housed an injured mourning dove. The dove was watching me suspiciously.

"Yeah, but every Yeerk ship we've ever dealt with has been either on the ground or about to land," Jake said. "Maybe the cloaking ability doesn't work when they get close to land. But if you think about it, Marco is right. They would have to be able to avoid being picked up by radar. Maybe they also have the ability to avoid being seen."

"It was a Yeerk ship," I said flatly.

"How can you be so sure?" Cassie asked. She was working as we talked, cleaning an empty cage with a brush and a bucket of sudsy water.

"It just was," I said stubbornly. "I . . . I just got this feeling from it. Also, it seemed huge.

Far bigger than even the biggest jet. This was huge. More like a real ship, you know, like an ocean liner."

"The question is, what do we do about it?" Jake asked. Of course, I knew he'd already made up his mind to do something. But Jake doesn't like to act like the one in charge, even though that's how I think of him. He lets everyone have their say first.

"I want to find out what it's doing," I said. "The first time, I had the feeling it was heading away from the mountains. The second time, it was doing just the opposite. It was flying too low to make it over the mountains. So I'm guessing it was doing something in the mountains."

Rachel nodded. "That makes sense."

14 Marco rolled his eyes. "The mountains? Have you suburb-dwellers ever been to the mountains? We're talking about a large area. No matter how big this ship is, it could hide in a thousand places in the mountains."

"Then we'd better start looking right away," Rachel said brightly.

Jake looked at Cassie. "Cass? What do you think?"

Cassie shrugged. "I halfway feel like we've done enough. You know? We attacked the Yeerk pool. We barely got out alive. We infiltrated Chapman's house and Rachel was captured.

Again, we barely got out alive. I guess the question is, how many risks are we going to take?

How many more times are we going to barely escape?"

I could see that Marco was surprised. Suddenly it sounded like Cassie was on his side.

"Exactly! Exactly! Just what I've been saying. Why is it our job to get killed?"

But then Cassie went and blew it all for him.

"I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I can't just do nothing while people are enslaved by the Yeerks." Cassie said. "Maybe it's just me . . ." She shrugged. "The thing is, I have these powers."

She shrugged again. "I can't just do nothing."

"Look, these aren't people we know," Marco argued. "They aren't my friends. Or my family."

He shot a guilty look at Jake. "And we did everything we could for Tom. So why should I get killed for strangers? We can't stay lucky forever. Don't you people understand that? Sooner or later, we'll slip up. Sooner or later we'll be standing around here crying because Jake or Rachel or Cassie or Tobias is gone."

"You know something?" Rachel exploded. "I'm tired of trying to talk you into this, Marco.

You want out? Fine, you're OUT!"

"Hey, Rachel, you're not just doing this to help save the human race," Marco yelled back.

"You get off on the danger. That's why you went with Tobias to free that bird. That wasn't about saving the world. That was about rescuing some stupid bird."

Marco realized he'd gone too far. He fell silent. The others all looked guiltily at me. Rachel shot Marco a look of pure anger.

"As of right now," I said, "as of today, only one of us has been hurt. Me. But I'm not going to give up. I'm not anyone's leader. But what I am going to do is go to the mountains tomorrow morning. What the rest of you do is your business."

"I'll be with you," Rachel said instantly.

Cassie nodded.

Jake made a wry smile. "You say you're not a leader, but I'll go with you."

Marco shook his head. "No," he said.

15 "Your choice," Rachel said.

"That's not what I meant," Marco said angrily. "I meant no, not in the morning. Tomorrow's a school day. If all of us skip school on the same day and later there's some trouble with the Yeerks, don't you think Chapman might put two and two together?"

Jake raised an eyebrow. "Marco's right. After school." He looked at the others and nodded.

It bothered me that Marco was right. But he was. Marco might be a pain in the butt. But he's a very smart guy.

It worried me a little. It made me wonder. Was he right about other things as well?

How many risks could we take before we lost? How long till the five of us were four? Or two?

Or none?

16 CHAPTER 6

Jake had a peregrine falcon morph we'd used before. Marco and Cassie had morphed ospreys.

Rachel had been a bald eagle. So we all should have been able to fly up to the mountains.

But there are millions of bird-watchers in this country. They're very cool people because they never hurt a bird. They don't hunt. They just get pleasure out of watching birds fly or nest.

Bird-watchers would think it was very, very weird if they saw a red-tail hawk, a bald eagle, a falcon, and two ospreys all flying together as if they were on a mission.

And some of those gentle bird-watchers might be not-so-gentle Controllers.

"Bird-watchers!" Marco snorted as he tramped over the carpet of pine needles deeper into the woods. "We could fly, but no. No, we have to walk. Twenty miles, probably!"

Cassie's farm has a lot of open grass areas, and it borders on a national forest. The national forest goes on forever. It stretches from the edge of town all the way up into the mountains.

It's all pines and oaks and elms and birches. Wilderness, really. Thousands of square acres of it.

"Oh, come on, Marco," Cassie chided gently. "It's an opportunity to try out a new morph!"

"Yeah," Jake chided. "Instead of being home doing math homework, you get to turn into a wolf. Are you going to tell me you'd rather be doing equations?"

"Let's see," Marco considered. "Math? Or becoming a wolf and going off to find aliens?

Maybe I should ask the school counselor what she thinks.' It's such a common problem. I'm sure she'd have some good advice."

Since it wasn't a good idea for us all to travel to the mountains as birds, the others needed a morph that could travel far and fast through woods. And there were the two injured wolves in Cassie's barn . . .

Jake stopped, looked around, and announced, "This is good." We were a few hundred yards into the woods. I came to rest on a low branch of a huge oak tree. The hawk in me took note of a squirrel a few branches up. He started chittering and shrieking his little squirrel warning: Danger! Danger!

Hawk! Hawk!

I gave him a look. He twitched, stuck the acorn he was holding into his cheek, and took off at full speed.

"What I don't get is why I have to be a girl wolf," Marco grumbled.