Текст книги "Animorphs - 17 - The Underground"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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17 – The Underground

K.A. Applegate

My name is Rachel.

You want to know my last name? Too bad. I don't give out my last name.

No offense. I'm not trying to be difficult or "too cool." I'm just being careful.

Here's the situation. Earth, our little blue and green planet, the one with the fluffy white clouds and all, is under attack.

It's not under attack like in some World War II documentary or something. Or like in Star Wars. It's more subtle than that. Not a lot of explosions and ray guns or whatever. In most wars, I guess what people are after is control of land or territory. Or at least they want to ram some idea down some other person's throat.

In this war, our enemies don't care about land. They don't care about ideology. They don't want to take over our capital city and raise some flag or whatever. They want us. They want our physical bodies.

They are called Yeerks. They are a race of parasitic slugs. Like tapeworms or something. They need to live in the bodies of other creatures. Otherwise they're just these gray slugs who slosh around helplessly in a Yeerk pool.

But unlike a tapeworm or something, Yeerks don't live in your intestines. They don't infest your stomach. It's your brain they infest.

They enter through your ear. They can squeeze and flatten themselves out to fit into very small spaces. They enter your ear and then your brain.

They squeeze and ooze down into all the little gullies and ridges and folds of your brain. And then they interface with your brain. They control you. Totally, absolutely.

They can open your memories anytime they want. You have no privacy.

None. No secrets. None. No escape. None. They are inside your dreams and thoughts and whims and wishes and desires.

Your brain becomes theirs. They own it. They lift your arms and bend your waist. They aim your eyes and focus on what they want to see. They eat for you. They go to the bathroom for you.

And because they have total access to your every single thought, they can pass for you. Flawlessly. They can be you, while always remaining themselves. Your friends will never know. Your mother and father will never know. You will be alone, trapped, helpless, paralyzed in your own body. Unable to make the simplest decision for yourself. Unable to stop yourself when you betray the ones you love. Unable to warn those whom the Yeerks target next.

A Controller. That's what we call a person who has been taken over by a Yeerk. A human-Controller. Although other species around the galaxy have already fallen to the Yeerks.

The Hork-Bajir are enslaved. The Gedds. The Taxxons, although those vile, evil worms did it voluntarily. And we've learned the Yeerks are moving against a race called the Leerans.

And they are moving against Earth, where people live their normal lives never knowing. I guess it's like having cancer or something. You never know the tumor is growing inside you till it's too late.

So now you know why I'm cautious. Why we hide our true identities.

And who are we? We are Animorphs. Five kids given the power to morph into any animal we can touch. Five kids who just had the bad luck to be there when the Andalite prince Elfangor landed

his damaged ship. Five of us and Elfangor's little brother, the Andalite Aximili-Esgarrouth-lsthill.

We call him Ax.

"Who is this Schwarzenegger?" Ax demanded. "l have heard Marco use his name before."

"Ah-nuld?" Marco demanded. "Who iss Ah-nuld? Ah-nuld iss der man, zat's who Ah-nuld iss."

"What man?"

"The man," Marco explained, explaining nothing.

We were walking through the woods. It was a nice afternoon and school was out for the day. We'd had a half day due to some teacher conference.

I don't know what the teachers were conferring about, but it was fine by me. The sun was out. The clouds were fluffy and light, with big sweeps of blue in between. The breeze was warm but not hot. Sitting in school on a day like that would have been a crime.

And since we didn't have anything important to deal with, we were conspiring together to do the thing we were never supposed to do: use our powers for personal, selfish reasons.

But it was tricky, see, because we knew Jake, my cousin and our sort-of leader, might get all tense and righteous on us. Not that he's that way at all. He isn't. But he's very responsible. Someone has to be, and it sure isn't me.

Still, if he decided to go along with this basically silly idea, we'd do it. If he decided to be against it, we might not do it. Or else Marco and I would do it and not tell Jake.

The trick was to present it the right way.

"See, Jake?" Marco said. "You see how totally, pathetically ignorant Ax is when it comes to really important human cultural stuff? Good grief!

It makes you want to cry! He knows nothing. Nothing! He's been on Earth for months and yet, has he experienced any really important human culture? No. And it's a travesty. A crime. A pity. A shame. It's a -"

"Oh, shu-u-ut up already," Jake interrupted in exasperation. "Let me get this straight. There's a new Planet Hollywood opening in town. And you and Rachel have decided you want to go, but you can't get tickets. So you want to fly there in morph. You want to use our powers for a totally selfish purpose. Is that it, basically?"

I shook my head. "No. Absolutely not. We want to do this for Ax. He needs to be exposed to culture. Me, I don't care." I grinned, unable to lie all that well.

"It's an entertainment event!" Marco cried. "A major, major event.

Stars! Famous people! Millionaires! Babes! A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Ax-man to see Bruce and Demi."

Cassie giggled out loud, then tried to look serious. Tobias, the remaining member of our group, was about a hundred feet above us, floating on a nice warm current of air. He was watching out for any intruders who might get close enough to notice that we were walking around with an An-dalite.

In case you've never seen an Andalite, and of course you haven't, they look like a strong blue deer with a mouth less face, with two extra eyes mounted on stalks, weak, human-looking arms, and a vicious scorpionlike tail.

So you can see why we'd want Tobias aloft to keep an eye open. A hawk's eye, no less, which meant no one was going to be sneaking up on us.

Jake nodded at Marco, totally unimpressed. He cocked a skeptical eyebrow at me. "And you figure the human culture Ax needs to be exposed to is Bruce Willis playing a harmonica? Come on, spill it. Why are you into this, Rachel?"

"The whole cultural thing. . . . Okay, look, as part of the deal they're having a fashion show. Ralph Lauren. You know how I feel about Ralph Lauren."

"Oh, man."

"Plus . . ." Marco said, letting the word hang in the air.

"Plus what?" Jake demanded.

I sighed. "Okay, Lucy Lawless is going to be there, too. But that's not why I want to go."

Jake looked puzzled.

"Lucy Lawless," Marco said. "She's the actress who plays Xena: Warrior Princess. Rachel's role model."

Okay, Xena is not my role model. That's just some stupid thing Marco made up. He calls me "Xena" to grind my nerves. Marco is good at grinding people's nerves. It's his specialty. If you could get paid for being annoying, Marco would be a millionaire.

But this wasn't the time to slam Marco.

Jake kind of made a face.

"And oh, by the way," Marco said with silky significance, "not that you care, Jake, but a Mr. O'Neal is going to be there. A Mr. Shaquille O'Neal."

"Shaq?"

"Shaq."

"Well, then we're there," Jake said.

We had what should have been the worst tickets at the whole event. We were at least a thousand feet from the main stage. A thousand feet, the length of three football fields plus a little more.

But we could see everything.

I could see flecks of spit when Bruce Willis played his harmonica. I could see Arnold's nose hair. I could see Shaq's shoelaces. I could see the individual buttons on the Ralph Lauren outfits. I could see Naomi Campbell's pores.

And yet she still looked great.

I had the eyes of a bald eagle. And to a bald eagle, a thousand feet is nothing.

I spread my wings six feet wide, stretched out my wing tips like feathered fingers, and felt the updraft of warm air lift me up and up.

In the air around me, at different altitudes, at various distances, there were a pair of ospreys, a peregrine falcon, a northern harrier, and a red-tailed hawk.

"We look like a raptor convention^ Tobias muttered. "l mean, why not throw in a golden eagle and a few kestrels? If there are any birdwatchers down there, they must be freaking."

"No one is watching us," I said. "They're watching Shaq jam with Bruce Willis and John Goodman."

Tobias is trapped in red-tailed morph. He lives as a red-tail, hunting and killing like a hawk. He has regained his power to morph, even his power to morph into his old human body. But his human body is like any other morph: If he stays in it more than two hours, he'll be trapped in it forever. He'd no longer be able to morph.

The show below us was on a huge outdoor stage. A massive crowd pressed up against the stage, surging and seething and sweating. And not looking all that great, either. I mean, from the air, mostly what you see of humans is their heads. You see little ovals of hair. And let me tell you something: There are a lot of bad haircuts out there.

Planet Hollywood was on the waterfront where the river cuts through downtown. Tall buildings loomed over it.

Skyscrapers fifty and sixty stories tall. I could look right in the windows and see that an awful lot of people had stayed late after work and were gazing down at the stage through binoculars and telescopes.

"There she is!" I yelled in sudden surprise. "l mean ... oh, that's her.

Lucy what's-her-name."

"Xena! It's Xena!" Marco cried, delighted. "0kay, Rachel, the time has come. Fly down there, morph back to human, and you and Xena have it out.

See who can kick whose butt."

"Marco, Marco, Marco," I sighed. "You do like to cling to your pathetic little dreams, don't you?"

"Yes. I absolutely do. And Rachel? Don't forget the leather outfit." For a moment I considered teaching Marco a lesson. He was in osprey morph. Ospreys are big birds. But they might as well be chickens alongside a bald eagle. It would be so easy to go into a stoop, shoot past him, flare up beneath him, and make him tumble.

Nah. It wouldn't be right.

I wheeled around in a huge circle that carried me close to the Kenny Building. The Kenny Building is one of those glass towers, all smooth and imposing. It sits almost alongside the river, 11 separated from the water by a four-lane road and a strip of grass.

The glass is slightly mirrored so normal eyes can't see inside all that well. But bald-eagle eyes are adapted for hunting fish. They see through water very well, and glass is a lot like water.

I saw a man in an otherwise empty office on the next to highest floor.

Sixty floors up. I don't know why he caught my eye, but he did. I banked to go back toward him.

And that's when he picked up the metal-framed chair and threw it into the window.

Crash! Glass exploded outward and fell spinning and sparkling to the ground. Big shards sliced through the tops of parked cars.

"What the . . . " I said. "Hey! Guys! Back here! Back here! To the Kenny Building, fast!"

"ls it Arnold?" Marco asked, like that was the only possible reason I could demand his attention.

But Cassie had spotted the crash of the window, too. "0h, man! That guy is going to jump!"

"l believe he would be injured if he jumped," Ax observed. "So I doubt he would – Ahh!"

The man had backed up and was running straight for the shattered window.

"There's six of us," I yelled. "Come on!"

"Not enough," Tobias said. "But maybe we could make the river." I raced for the window. The others came flapping up from below, or plunging from above, or wheeling around from the same altitude.

The man ran. He stuck his hands out to push away the last shards of glass. Then he launched himself, feet first, into space.

The wind ripped across my face. I used every last ounce of the eagle's flying instincts to gain speed. Was it enough?

I was practically face-to-face with the man as he cleared the building.

There was a frozen sort of Road Runner-Wile E. Coyote moment when he seemed to hang suspended in air. Then, he plummeted.

I opened my talons, stretched them forward, and caught a shred of collar as he dropped. Instantly his speed dragged me down and I sank a second talon in. Right around his collarbone. I think I managed to nick him pretty good, but that was the least of this guy's problems.

I opened my wings, but I might as well have been opening an umbrella.

Maybe I shaved one mile an hour off his speed. Not much.

Then Tobias swept in like a guided missile. He grabbed the man's left arm. Jake was next, in his insanely fast peregrine falcon morph. He snagged the back of the man's collar.

He was slowing. But not nearly enough.

"Glide toward the water!" Tobias yelled. "No, don't flap, you idiots, glide!"

I forgave Tobias for calling us idiots. When it comes to flying, he is the expert. And it was a slightly tense situation.

"Aaaaahhhhhhh!" the man screamed so suddenly I nearly lost my grip. He was staring right at me, his left eye maybe an inch from my right eye.

He seemed like a normal-looking, middle-aged guy. Aside from the fact that he was screaming in terror.

Cassie and Ax arrived. Both grabbed talon-holds. Marco was last and he went for all that was left, grabbing the back of the man's suit jacket.

"line up your wings on my angle," Tobias yelled. "Like you're aiming for a level glide, but stay focused on the river!" Six birds of prey clutched that man. He screamed. But he was falling slower.

He was definitely falling slower. Still too fast to survive a concrete landing. But slower.

And he was moving forward. Foot by foot, he was moving toward the water's edge.

Down we dropped.

Forward we edged.

I wanted to giggle. It was like some bizarre geometry problem. The sum of the squares of the angles . . . would we make it?

The ground rushed up at us. Cars zipped by at sixty miles an hour below.

Then a strip of grass. Way too close! We were no more than fifty feet up.

Water's edge!

"Release!" Tobias cried. "Release, but watch out for the snapback!" We released. The man dropped. Freed of the weight, I went tumbling, wildly out of control, through the air. I flapped, I spun, I flapped some more, and by a miracle, I righted myself.

Oh. That's what Tobias had meant by "snap-back."

ZOOOOOM! I blew across the surface of the water, so low my breastbone surfed the tops of the swells.

Wings full again, I caught enough headwind to soar up. "Ah-HAH! Yow! Oh, that was SO cool!" I exulted. Then I felt guilty. "Everyone okay?" I wheeled around and looked for the man. He was not on the surface of the water. I peered down through the murky, salty river water.

The man was ten feet down, waving his arms madly, thrashing and blowing bubbles and looking terrified.

"You have GOT to be kidding," I moaned. "He's stuck in the mud on the river bottom! Cassie and Marco! Come on, we're supposed to be waterbirds, right?"

I dove straight down into the water.

What a cool feeling. One minute warm air, the next second, cold water.

Then not so cool. The water didn't soak into my feathers, but it did make it impossible to flap my wings. I guess I'd assumed I would sort of fly underwater. Wrong. Eagles may dive and snag fish swimming near the surface, but that does not make them ducks.

"Cassie! Marco! Don't do it!" I yelled in thought-speak.

"No duh," Marco said. "Just because you're a lunatic, doesn't mean we are."

"Rachel! You have to morph!" Cassie said. "He's struggling!" I was already changing. Any time you morph, you have to pass through your true body on the way to another form. So there I was, a very wet bird, already feeling my lungs burn, underwater and being swept away by the current.

I morphed as fast as I could. Being terrified always helps.

As soon as I felt my human arms and legs beginning to appear, I fought my way toward the surface. I saw that shimmering, silvery barrier between air and water above me and I used my mutating limbs – feathery, half-bird, half-human stumps – to swim up and up toward air.

I stuck my face up out of the water.

"Aaarrrgghhh!!" someone screamed.

"Oh, my lord, what is it?"

Some people in a little motorboat. I guess they'd been listening to the music from the Planet Hollywood.

I sucked air and went down again.

"I think it was a dead body!"

Thanks, I thought. Hope that's not a prophecy.

I focused on morphing a dolphin. I had the DNA inside me, and I'd morphed dolphin before.

Now I was an eerie mix of human and dolphin. Gray rubber skin and legs melted together to make a tail and hands that were turning into flippers.

I powered back toward the poor suicide guy. Although by now I wasn't feeling sorry for him, so much as really annoyed. I mean, what is it with people killing themselves? How big a moron do you have to be not to figure out that at least if you stay alive you have some hope, as opposed to being dead and having zero?

Besides, I was missing the fashion show.

He was a weird apparition as he loomed up in front of my dolphin snout.

He had sunk up to his thighs in the mud. He'd fought his way partly out, but was still in the goo up to his knees.

And now he was limp, motionless. But I knew he sure wasn't going to die if I could help it, the stupid, inconsiderate jerk.

I buried my snout in the small of his back, bent him backward till he was practically lying on me, and kicked like mad with my dolphin tail.

He came up with a shloooomp sound and a cloud of disturbed mud. I pushed him up to the surface and nosed him to the riverbank.

Strong human arms reached for him and yanked him up onto dry land.

Very strong human arms.

Well, that's just classic," I complained the next day as we all hooked up at the mall food court after school. I had USA Today. I had our local newspaper and a bunch of others. Every one of them showed the same picture. And they all had basically the same headline: Schwarzenegger Real-Life Hero: Gives Mouth-to-Mouth to Drowning Man One paper said:

Terminator Becomes Resuscitator

"This society is way too celebrity-obsessed," I said. "It is so superficial."

"Yeah, I hate that," Cassie said. She gave me a mocking look. Cassie thinks I'm too concerned with looks and clothes. Cassie is my best friend and I would give my life for her, but you should see what she wears. For Cassie, dressing up is putting on clean jeans and socks that actually match.

"We were lucky," Jake said. "No one happened to snap any pictures of a pack of raptors carrying the guy to the water. And no one happened to wonder why a dolphin would be so far upstream from the ocean."

"The man was lucky, too," Cassie said.

Marco shook his head. "No way. Lucky would have been getting mouth-to-mouth from Naomi Campbell."

"Where are the cinnamon buns?" Ax asked. "Tobias said he would get some.

Cinnamon buns. Bun-zuh."

Ax was there in his human morph, of course, since the sight of an Andalite hanging around the food court would have attracted just a little attention. But the real Ax did not have a mouth. Did not have the ability to make spoken sounds. And worst of all, did not have a sense of taste.

So when he morphed to human, he tended to become fixated on taste and sounds. Especially taste.

And especially, for some strange reason, on cinnamon buns.

"I wonder what happens to George Edelman now?" Cassie asked.

"Who?"

She rolled her eyes at me. "The guy. The man. The man whose life you saved, Rachel."

"Oh. Is that his name?"

"Yes, it was in all the newspaper articles," she said, exasperated with me.

I shrugged. "Okay, okay. So his name is George Edelman. Big deal."

Cassie leaned across the table. "Rachel, you saved this man's life.

Without you the rest of us wouldn't have seen him in time. Without you he'd have been a splat on the concrete. You are a hero. A human life was saved. He may go on to cure cancer or something. And you don't remember his name?"

Now that she mentioned it, I did feel like maybe I should know the man's name. On the other hand .... "Hey, wait a minute. This guy isn't anything to me," I said. "It's not like I'm responsible for him."

Marco made a back and forth gesture with his hand. "I don't know. Isn't it the Chinese who say if you save a man he becomes your responsibility?

Or maybe it's the Japanese. The Greeks? Someone. I saw it in a movie."

I shrugged again. Now I was feeling defensive. "It was mostly just a goof, you know? I just wanted to see if we could do it. It was ..." I searched my mind for the right word. "It was a challenge. That's it, a challenge."

Tobias arrived, carrying a Cinnabon cinnamon bun. One of the large ones.

Dripping with icing and smelling of cinnamon. Lots of cinnamon.

Ax's human eyes went wide. His mouth hung open slightly. It was weird, because Ax's human morph is made up of DNA from Cassie, Jake, Marco, and me. So you're always seeing something familiar in him, you know? Like maybe it's your own mouth hanging open, or Marco's eyes.

Tobias set the paper plate down on the table. "I figured we could all have a bite and then leave the rest for -" He stopped and stared at Ax with an expression of amusement mixed with awe.

Ax had snagged the bun. He'd snagged the plate and the plastic fork, too. He was busy shoving them into his mouth. Bun and plate and fork.

Great big huge bun and little paper plate.

I reached over and grabbed the end of the plastic fork. Half of it was already in Ax's mouth. I yanked it out. It was too late to save the plate.

The five of us just sat there for a few minutes and watched as Ax chewed and slobbered and gulped and shoved with his fingertips.

It was alittle like watching a python try to swallow a small pig.

"George Edelman, huh?" I said, breaking the spell.

"Yeah," Jake said. "But everyone keep an eye on TV and newspapers for a while, okay? If someone noticed our. . . activities ... we want to know about it. Mostly, we have to hope George Edelman keeps his mouth shut."

"People will figure he's nuts," Marco pointed out. "No one is gonna listen to a guy who tried to kill himself."

Three days later. My house. My still-not-completely-fixed house.

"Jordan! JORDAN!"

That would be me, yelling. I was in the kitchen. I had opened the refrigerator and discovered that my white paper container of leftover Chinese food was gone.

"Jor-DAN! You little thief."

"What?"

I turned away from the refrigerator and slammed straight into the kitchen island. We didn't used to have a kitchen island. But our kitchen had been annihilated when my bedroom had collapsed down into it.

The construction had been pretty shoddy, I guess. And it hadn't helped at all that I had morphed into an African elephant in my bedroom.

Fortunately, no one in my family knew that but me.

Anyway, we were in the process of getting a much cooler kitchen now. My mom's a lawyer and she got the insurance company to pay up right away.

Plus the builder of the house was so scared that something else would happen, he was doing all the labor free.

I felt bad about the builder getting blamed. But what was I supposed to say? "Mom, it was me. See, I was allergic to this crocodile morph, and it made me morph out of control so that I ..." You get the idea. Wasn't going to happen.

Anyway, I slammed into the new kitchen island and fought down the urge to say something I shouldn't repeat. But I was mad, and now I was mad with a bruise on my hip, so i stuck my finger in my little sister's face and said, "You! You ate my Szechuan shrimp! I was saving it. I want it.

I want it right now."

A couple years ago that would have scared Jordan. But she's getting older now, and more independent. Plus more of a smart-mouth.

"Rachel, I took your stupid shrimp yesterday. And I threw it out."

"What! You threw out my Szechuan shrimp? You are always doing something with my leftovers."

She shook her head slowly, pityingly. "It was already a week old, duh.

It was too old, duh. It would have made you barf up your kidneys, duh.

Shrimp doesn't exactly stay good forever, duh. And oh, by the way, did I mention, duh?"

"You should have asked me!" I cried, in no mood to be reasonable.

"Okay, Rachel," Jordan said placidly. "Should I have thrown out your rancid, bacteria-crawling, moldy leftovers like Mom asked me to, or should I have left them for you to eat so you'd end up having to get your stomach pumped?"

Well. When she put it that way. Boy, I hate when someone gets the better of me. But I could not think of a single really crushing comeback. So I said, "I'll let it go this time."

Jordan rolled her eyes. "Thank you, thank you, Queen Rachel. I'm so glad you'll let me live."

My mom walked in, carrying two leather briefcases. One was normal size.

The other was one of those big, kind of square ones. She hefted them both up onto the counter.

She looked tired, like she usually does when she gets home from work.

She's not all that high up in the firm, so she works constantly. But she grinned.

"Hey! Congratulate me. I'm a celebrity. Did you girls eat?

How was school? Where's Sarah? And don't tell me she's at Tisha's house again. Every time she comes home from there I end up buying her another Barbie."

"School was fine," I said. "We haven't had dinner. You want me to make something?"

"Or we could order out," Jordan said smugly. "Rachel would like some pus-oozing, rotten shrimp."

"Mom! Mom!" Sarah yelled, tearing in through the door from the backyard.

"Tisha says they have a lawyer Barbie! A lawyer Barbie. Just like you!"

"So what's this about being a celebrity?" I asked.

"Oh, well, I was mostly kidding. You know that guy in the papers a few days ago? The one who was rescued by Arnold Schwarzman? He was on TV and CNN."

"Schwarzenegger?"

"No, the man he rescued. Anyway, guess what? I'm his lawyer. His family says he's incompetent. They want to -"

"Incompetent? Is that where you have to wear those adult diapers?"

Jordan asked.

"No, honey, not incontinent. They are alleging he's incompetent. Not able to look after his own affairs. That's what they allege."

"Nuts," I translated. "Wacko. Allegedly wacko."

"Don't say wacko," my mother said, looking pained. "Mentally unbalanced will do fine. His family want to have him institutionalized permanently."

"So what are you supposed to do?" I asked. "Prove he's not wacko? I mean, he is, right? He jumped off a building."

"Lawyer Barbie could save him," Sarah said.

"Actually, it's a little worse than that," my mom said, gathering Sarah up into her arms. "Apparently this poor man claims he has an alien living in his head."

My heart beat three times real fast. Then stopped.

"He calls them Yerks or Yorks or something."

"Oh that's the nuthouse," Marco said with satisfaction as we all gazed up the hill at the pleasant-looking but weirdly quiet two-story structure. "I always suspected I'd end up here."

He gave me a wink. I had to laugh. See, I was about to make that same joke about him. He beat me to it.

Cassie sighed. "I don't think the patients probably like to be called nuts," she said.

"Of course not," I agreed. "They'd have to be nuts to want to be called nuts."

Marco gave me a discreet low five behind my back.

"Cassie's right. It's not politically correct to call nuts nuts," Tobias said.

Cassie looked at me. "You know, I could swear I heard that bird talking. I must be nuts."

We all laughed. Even Jake, who was trying, with the usual total lack of success, to get us all to behave seriously.

We were gathered near the Rupert J. Kirk State Mental Health Facility.

It was two floors of red brick. There was a little fountain just outside the front door, and lots of shade trees and lawn chairs sitting out on the grass. It could have been an old folks' home, or a slightly aged apartment building. Except for the fact that it was encircled by a high chain-link fence. And there were three strands of barbed wire atop that fence. And there was heavy wire mesh on the windows. But aside from all that, it looked perfectly nice.

"Who else has the willies?" Cassie wondered. I held up my hand.

"What are willies?" Ax asked. He was in human morph.

"A vague, creepy feeling," Tobias explained. "The subtle, unsettling sense that something you can't quite see is desperately wrong."

"The feeling I get when I reach the school door every day," Jake muttered.

"School, nuthouse, what's the difference when you get right down to it?"

Marco asked philosophically. "Dumb rules and bad food in both places."

Jake jerked his head to indicate we should move along.

We were on the sidewalk across the street, lurking along a row of parked cars. And what's weird is, I swear the sun went behind a cloud the moment we reached the facility.

We walked along, with Tobias flitting from tree to tree overhead.

"Easy enough to bust in," Jake observed. "A fence, a door, big deal. Not like the Fenestre mansion or the Yeerk pool. Easy."

"Yeah," I agreed. "So we get in, we find this George Edelman and try to figure out if he knows something about the Yeerks. Then we leave Marco behind and get out."

Jake raised an eyebrow. "Okay, I think we may have to put a limit on the number of nut jokes. This is serious."

Marco made a deprecating noise. "Nan. This isn't serious."

"Every time we start to take something for granted we end up getting hammered," Jake warned. He grinned in anticipation. "We'd have to be nuts to get careless."

No one laughed.

"I say, we'd have to be nuts. . . oh, fine. Don't laugh. I don't care."

"We need an open window or something," I said. I looked over the building. No open windows that I could see. It was thick glass and heavy wire mesh all the way.

"We can't hurt anyone," Jake pointed out. "No fighting. Those are innocent people in there. We can't take the risk of hurting anyone. It's too far to travel in fly or cockroach morph. Hmmm. Maybe not that easy, after all."

Just then, like an answer to our prayers, a truck drove up the driveway and around to the far side of the facility.

"Was that a food truck?" Jake asked. "Tobias? Can you go take a look?"