Текст книги "Animorphs - 17 - The Underground"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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But it was Cassie who surprised me. Usually she's the one getting all moral.

"Cassie?" i asked. "What do you think?"

She hesitated. Like she just wanted to keep tending to the badger. She sighed and stood up. When she turned around, I was shocked. She had a stricken look.

"I ... I don't know anymore, okay?" she said.

I was confused for a moment. Then it hit me. We'd had a bad run-in with a human-Controller whose Yeerk was Visser Three's twin brother. This Yeerk had found another way around the Kan-drona. He cannibalized fellow Yeerks. Sometimes human hosts got in the way.

In the heat of the moment, hearing that evil creature speak, Cassie had demanded his destruction. She'd asked Jake to do it. Jake had refused.

I don't know why, but it frightened me to think of Cassie not knowing what was right and wrong. Or at least thinking she didn't know. Cassie was my best friend. I counted on her to balance me. She was supposed to be sensible when I was reckless. She was supposed to be moral when I was ruthless.

But things had gotten more and more confused for all of us, I guess.

"Look," I said, "okay, maybe this oatmeal is a drug to the Yeerks. But you know what? This is a war. Sooner or later, if we are successful, if the Andalites send help, if the human race rises up, we're going to try and destroy every Yeerk on planet Earth. Right? That's our goal. This isn't like some normal war where you hope you can make peace and compromise. We can't compromise. The Yeerks are parasites. How do we compromise? Let them have a few million humans as hosts?"

"They will never compromise, anyway," Ax said. "They must be forced back to their own home world."

"So we try and feed them addictive drugs," Tobias said with obvious distaste.

"It's OAT-freaking-MEAL!" Marco exploded.

Cassie suddenly laughed. It was a cynical laugh. I didn't know she was capable of a cynical laugh. "And all the rights and wrongs, and all the lines between good and evil, just go wafting and waving and swirling around, don't they?"

Jake shook off his funk and stepped to the center of our little group.

"I have to ask myself: If it were Tom, and it may be Tom in the end, would I do this to him? On the one hand, life as a slave of a Yeerk. No free will at all. On the other hand, as we saw with Mr. Edelman, some free will, some ability to communicate, but with this insane Yeerk in your brain."

"So?" Tobias asked him. "What's your answer? " Jake shrugged. "In the Civil War, they were ending slavery. Most of the Southern soldiers who were killed weren't slave owners. They were just guys trying to be brave. Maybe they could have worked out a compromise.

Maybe they could have ended the war earlier if the North had agreed to leave some people as slaves. But would that have been right? No. So the war had to go on till everyone was free."

"Or dead," Tobias added grimly. "But okay, that's a pretty good example.

You're right. I hate it, but you're right. We have to win." I laughed without any humor at all. I'm pretty gung ho. Unlike Cassie, unlike Tobias perhaps, I'm ruthless at times. But even I have enough sense to know the words "we have to win" are the first four steps on the road to hell.

And I noticed that Jake never answered himself about his brother. Would Tom be getting the magic oatmeal slipped into his breakfast?

Not a chance. Jake still hoped to rescue Tom some day. And from what Edelman had said, there was no rescue from an oatmeal-altered Yeerk.

"Where do we find a bunch of human-Controllers sitting down to eat?"

Marco wondered.

I sighed. "The Yeerk pool, Marco. The Yeerk pool."

The Yeerk pool. I dreamed about it that night.

I didn't use to dream much. Or at least, I seldom recalled my dreams. I dream a lot now. Terrible dreams where I'm trapped in some hideous shape, half-human, half-insect. I dream about that awful battle in the ant tunnels. I dream about the screaming, slashing massacre when we took the Kandrona at the top of the EGS Tower.

But I dream most about the Yeerk pool. I hear the screams and curses of human hosts held in cages while their Yeerks swim in the leaden water of the pool. I hate that sound. I hate the sound of despair. It makes me mad. In my dream I'm mad at those poor people and I want to yell, "Why don't you fight? Why don't you fight?"

But then it's me. It's me being led out onto that steel pier by a pair of Hork-Bajir warriors. It's me kicking and screaming and begging, "Please, please, someone help me!" Knowing there is no help.

Knowing I am doomed, and feeling the despair, and hating that feeling inside of me.

I feel the Hork-Bajir kick my legs from under me. And I'm facedown on the steel pier. And they shove me forward till my face is just an inch above the gray sludge of the Yeerk pool.

It seethes and boils with the swift movements of the Yeerk slugs.

And then my head goes down. Down into the liquid. And the Yeerk that will own me is there. I see him, a gray slug, a vague, indistinct shape in the liquid.

I struggle, but what can I do against two Hork-Bajir? I struggle, but my head is held there as I scream bubbles.

The Yeerk touches my ear. Like a large snail. That's how it feels. Then the pain ... it forces its way into my ear! It's inside my ear! The pain is incredible, but so much worse is simply knowing it has me.

It surges into my brain.

And I am yanked, gasping, up from the pool.

I try to grab my ear. But my arm no longer works.

I try to yell. But my mouth is not mine anymore.

So I scream, in some dark, lonely corner of my own brain, I scream.

And the Yeerk chuckles as it opens my memories and reads my life. And I give way to the despair.

When I woke up I had soaked the pillow with my sweat. I stared at the clock. Three-twenty-seven. a.m.

The Yeerk pool. We were going back to the Yeerk pool. And I, Rachel, mighty Xena, fearless, pulled the covers up over my head and shook.

At dawn I got up and put on a robe. It was cloudy out, so the dawn was just gray. But I went to my window and opened it, just as I do every morning.

Tobias arrived, almost silent. He swept inside and landed easily on my dresser.

"How you doing?" he asked.

"Fine," I whispered. "How about you?"

I have to whisper when Tobias comes over. My sisters are right in the next room. I keep my door locked.

"I had a nice breakfast," Tobias said. "A lucky hunt." I went to my desk and opened my book. It was my homework. "Can you stand math?"

"I've gotten so I kind of like math," Tobias said. "It's something that's the same for all humans or whatever."

I opened my book.

I guess it was a weird scene. Me, with this big red-tailed hawk perched on the edge of my desk. Sitting there in the glow of a single lamp, while the rest of my family still slept. But we did it lots of mornings.

Whenever Tobias managed to find an early breakfast and it wasn't raining.

"You worried about going back to the Yeerk pool?" I laughed nonchalantly. "If I'm ever not worried about going to the Yeerk pool, you can lock me up with Mr. Edelman."

"Yeah. Look, I'm going with you guys this time. What morph do you think we'll use?"

I sighed. "You don't have to do this, you know."

"Yes I do. What morph?"

"I don't know. Probably fly or cockroach. Do you have an entrance for us?"

Part of what Tobias did with his long days, while the rest of us were in school, was monitor the movements of known Controllers. He kept track of the ever-shifting entrances to the Yeerk pool. It was fairly easy for him.

"Yeah, I have an entrance," he said. If he'd had a mouth, he would have grinned. "You guys are going to love this one." I gave him a sidelong look. "If it leads to the Yeerk pool, I don't think I'll ever love it."

"This was not easy to figure out," Tobias said proudly. "Hours and hours of following known Controllers. Then I had to keep stealing peeks in through the windows. I even morphed to human to check out the inside.

That's how I found out about the Happy Meal."

We were flies. The six of us. We were inside a McDonald's, zipping madly around. It was crazy. The scent of food was everywhere. Pickles. Meat.

Ketchup. Grease. Special sauce.

My fly body thought it had died and gone to heaven. Outside of a good trash dump, there's no place a fly likes more than a fast-food restaurant.

"What about the Happy Meal?" Cassie asked.

"Why is the meal happy?" Ax asked.

Tobias decided to answer Cassie's question. "That's how you signal.

That's the code. You go up to the counter and say "I'd like a Happy Meal. With extra happy." That's the signal." I flew upside down along the ceiling, looking for a place to land and rest. I buzzed to a nice greasy patch near the deep fryer, turned a back flip, and set down. My mouth – actually, it was more like some insanely long straw that could curl up – extended down and began spitting digestive juices onto the grease, then sucking up the resulting goo.

Hey, I know it's gross. But it was either that or keep resisting the fly's desperate cries for food! food! food!

"After you place the Happy Meal order, you go around like you're going to the bathroom. But instead, you take the other door. The one that goes to the kitchen. You go in – and here's the cool part – you go into the walk-in refrigerators

"Then what?" Jake asked.

"Then I don't know. I could never see all the way inside."

"Okay. So here's the plan," Jake said. "We watch till someone orders the Happy Meal with . . . what was it?"

"Extra happy," Tobias said.

"ls it just my imagination, or did the Yeerks develop a sense of humor?" Marco asked.

"Once we have our Controller, we follow him in. No problem," Jake said. Then he added grimly, "Oh yeah, no problem. A little picnic in the Yeerk pool. I'm sure they'll all buy that."

"Um, Jake?" Marco said. "You said that last part out loud. We heard it."

"Oh. Sorry."

"Mr. Inspiration" I said with a laugh. "Come on. Let's -"

"Uh-uh-uh! Don't say "let's do it," Rachel," Marco yelled.

We took turns hanging out above the counter. But we didn't have too long a wait till a woman came in and ordered a Happy Meal with "extra happy."

We buzzed easily along behind her as she went through the door and into the kitchen. Then into the walk-in refrigerator.

"Gotta get out of here, man," I said. "This cold is slowing me down."

"Yes, this body has no ability to regulate body temperature," Ax observed. "What a strange idea. You humans do many unusual things."

"Ax, I don't think we're exactly responsible for -"

"Yes, I know. I was attempting to make a joke. A human-style joke."

"Great," Marco muttered. "Funny Yeerks and now a wannabe-funny Andalite." The Controller woman waited patiently and after a few seconds, the back of the walk-in refrigerator split and opened wide.

She stepped and we flew through the opening. It really was going to be easy this time.

BrrrrEEEEET! BrrrrEEEEET! "Unauthorized life-form detected." BrrrrEEEEET BrrrrEEEEET! "Unauthorized life-form detected."

The Controller woman looked around. I saw her blue eyes, each the size of a swimming pool, turn and look. Through the shattered, splintered fly vision, I could see her focus.

Then she muttered under her breath, "Security fanatics. It's just a couple of lousy flies."

But the mechanical voice was giving instructions now.

"Shut your eyes tightly to protect against retinal damage from the Gleet BioFilter."

"The what?" I asked.

"Get out of here!" Ax yelled.

"What?"

"Out! Out! Out!" he yelled.

Ax never yells. So if he does yell, you have to figure it's a good idea to pay attention.

I spun around in midair the way only a fly can do, and I hauled wing for the still-open crack that led to the refrigerator.

Suddenly, the whole world blew up in a dazzling explosion of light. I felt my compound eyes melt. I flew on, blinded, blew through the rapidly narrowing crack and hit the cold air.

"l'm blind!" I cried.

"l think we all are," Ax said calmly. "We're lucky to be just blinded. A Gleet BioFilter destroys all life-forms whose DNA is not entered into the computer controls. Andalite technology, of course. The Yeerks must have stolen the specifications"

"Ax, are you telling me that filter thing will wipe out any life-form except the one they program it for?" Jake asked.

"Yes, Prince Jake. I'm sorry to say, yes. Everything but the particular human-Controller."

"Then we're shut off from the Yeerk pool," Tobias said. "They must have this same technology at all the entrances now." It was hard to get too upset by the idea of being locked out of the Yeerk pool. But it was frustrating. And it kind of made me mad. I didn't like the idea of being outsmarted by the Yeerks.

"There must be some other way in," I said.

"l'd like to know what it would be," Marco said.

For a moment no one said anything. Then Cassie said, "Well . . . there is one way."

"I take it back!" Marco said. "I take it back! I can tell by your tone, Cassie, I really don't want to know."

Back at Cassie's barn we gathered around and stared at a small cage.

"What is that, a rat?" Marco asked.

"lt's a mole," Tobias said.

"Count on Tobias to know his rodents," Marco said. He looked up at the rafters where Tobias was preening – cleaning his feathers with his beak.

"How do they taste?"

"I've never caught one. They don't come up to the surface very often."

"That is one ugly creature," I said. "And it looks way too much like a shrew." I had morphed a shrew once. It wasn't a good time. The shrew was way too hyped. Way too excitable. And way, way too hungry.

"It's a lot calmer than a shrew," Cassie said. "And like Tobias said, moles spend almost all their time underground. They dig tunnels. See how big the front feet are? They're well-adapted for digging tunnels."

Marco sighed. "Moleman. You can't even picture a superhero named Moleman. What would the superpowers be? Digging?"

"Many of your Earth animals are similar to this in shape," Ax observed.

"Yeah," Cassie agreed. "It's a very successful shape: rats, mice, voles, shrews, even squirrels and raccoons to a certain extent. Your basic low-slung, four-legged rodent shape."

I sighed. "So let me get this straight. You're suggesting we morph this mole and dig our way down to the Yeerk pool?"

Cassie shrugged. Then she winked at me. "Just trying to be helpful."

"It's probably, what, fifty feet down through the dirt to the top of the Yeerk pool?"

"At least," Tobias said.

"That's a lot of dirt," Jake said. "But I don't know of another way. If we're going to do this, we need to get back to the Yeerk pool."

"Has anyone figured out how we're supposed to get a whole lot of oatmeal down there after we dig these mole tunnels?" Tasked.

Jake nodded like he was going to say "sure."

Instead he said, "Nope. But we need to start stocking up. Everyone start bugging your parents to buy instant maple-and-ginger flavor oatmeal. Lots of it. We'll start with that. Then we'll spend our allowances for more."

Marco shook his head. "No need. I do the food shopping at my house. My dad drops me off, hits Target for all that kind of stuff, then picks me up. I can supply the oatmeal."

"Okay, then," Jake said. "Nothing left to do but acquire this mole here."

I made a face. I was nearest the cage. "Does it bite?"

"I wouldn't think so," Cassie said. "It usually just eats ... I mean, I don't think it'll bite you."

I turned on her. "What does it usually eat, Cassie?"

"Well, it eats what you'd expect an underground animal to eat. It eats worms. Mostly worms."

"Oh, great," I moaned.

I stretched out my hand and Cassie opened the cage. I touched the mole and kept my hand there while I felt the mole DNA become a part of me. I suppose the mole became quiet and still, the way most animals do when you acquire them, but who could tell? It was already pretty quiet.

When it came to Tobias's turn, the mole got a bit more excited. You have to be in your own body when you acquire new DNA. And now the hawk body was Tobias's own true body. So to acquire the mole, he had to flap down to the cage and grab the poor creature with his talons.

Just as Cassie's father arrived, we left the barn and went toward the school.

The Yeerk pool is a vast, underground complex. It's like one of those covered football stadiums or whatever. In the center is the pool itself, but there is an open area all around the pool, so all together it's probably a thousand or fifteen hundred feet across. I'm guessing. We never exactly measured it.

It's big, for being a hole in the ground. It stretches beneath the school and clear over to the mall. At least the entrances do. The entrances are concealed stairways that come in from angles all around the pool. We've found entrances in the janitor's closet at school (the Yeerks eliminated that one later) and in the dressing rooms at The Gap in the mall.

"Based on the entrances we've found over time, I think the center of the Yeerk pool is right at this intersection^ Tobias said.

We were all at the intersection between the school and the mall.

"Well, we can't dig here," I said.

"We wouldn't want to," Marco pointed out. "We don't want to be right over the pool when we dig through." He made a falling motion with his hands then said, "Splash!"

"Good point," I agreed. The idea of falling into the Yeerk pool itself was nauseating.

Jake said, "However, we want to be close to the pool itself so we can tell exactly where it is when we dig through. That way we can dig a horizontal side tunnel out over the pool and use it to drop the oatmeal."

Marco nodded. "I have the strange feeling this will involve some kind of geometry I should have paid attention to in class."

"You are asking for a lot of precision, Prince Jake," Ax said. "We have no instruments. Stru-ments. Not even primitive human instruments.

Struuu-ments. Mints? In-stru-mints?"

"We have to make an educated guess, Ax. And don't call me 'prince.'"

"Yes, Prince Jake."

Tobias had come to rest on a high lamppost. Hawks have amazingly good hearing, so he could still hear us talking.

I looked up at him. "Tobias? You're the one who keeps track of entrances and stuff. What's your best estimate?"

"And don't forget, we could use some privacy for morphing," Jake said.

Tobias opened his wings and flew up and up. He inscribed a swift, irregular circle in the sky, then came back to roost. "l think I have a place."

It turned out to be a toolshed. It was in the backyard of a house that was empty and had a decrepit "For Sale" sign in the weeds of the overgrown front yard.

The house was on the main road, sandwiched between a convenience store and a place that sold hot tubs. There was a lot of noisy traffic going by all the time. Some distance behind the house there was a forlorn little park. Just a few trees, some picnic tables, and a lumpy sort of hill with rocks jutting out of the soil. It didn't look like anyone had lived in the house in a long time.

The toolshed was rusted tin with a dirt floor. It was empty, except for some bags of potting soil and a rake.

"Perfect," Jake declared. "A little cramped, but perfect. But once we're all in mole morph, it'll be roomy enough."

Cassie cleared her throat. "Dm . . . maybe I should have mentioned this earlier. But it's not about all of us being moles at once. Not at first, anyway. I mean, only one mole can dig at a time."

We all stared at her as we let that bit of information sink in. Somehow I'd had images of us all down underground digging away together. Now I was getting a very different picture.

"We're gonna be down there alone?" Marco yelped. "Underground? Dirt pressing in all around us? No air?"

Cassie shrugged. "Well, you'll be a mole."

"Well, then it's all right," Marco said with shrill sarcasm. "We'll be moles, so it's okay to be under twenty feet of dirt with no air."

"Oh, you big baby," I said. "No problem."

I say these things. I don't know why. They just pop out of my stupid mouth.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Marco said, placing his hand on my shoulder, "we have a volunteer."

What could I say? I had to tough it through. "Okay. Fine, Weenie-boy.

I'll go first."

It was hot in the little shed with all of us crammed in there. Hot and airless. And already I was feeling a little claustrophobic.

You know, the fear of tight spaces.

I focused my mind on the image of the mole. And by whatever weird means the morphing technology works, I began to change.

The first thing I noticed was that there was more room in the shed. The bodies that had been pressed close were getting farther away. I was shrinking.

But I wasn't shrinking at the same rate all over. My legs and arms were shrinking much, much faster.

FLUMP!

My butt hit the floor!

"Whoa!" Jake yelled. "Catch her!"

Jake and Cassie grabbed me. Just in time to keep me from falling over.

Too late to save my dignity.

Marco started giggling. "Heh heh, ha ha ha ha!"

Cassie was snorting desperately, trying not to laugh.

My legs had shriveled away, leaving nothing but feet. My arms were nothing but hands. I was still a human being, but with feet alone where my legs should have been.

Jake and Cassie held my shoulders and balanced me upright. I was like one of those blowup clowns you punch and it rolls back. I was sitting down, waving my toes and fingers and wishing I could strangle Marco.

"Wait till it's your tuuuuurn, nyarco!" I yelled. But my face chose that moment to start pushing out and out and out.

They laid me down on my face finally, since I was now about two feet long. Thick black-brown fur began to sweep across me, transforming me from mostly human to mostly mole in appearance.

My face just kept bulging outward, forming a fantastically long, ratlike snout.

But while most of me seemed to be shrinking, my hands seemed to be growing. Relative to the rest of me, anyway. I was growing hands like claw-tipped shovels. Big, flat, hairless, hard, with stubby claws on the ends of each "finger." My hands twisted as I watched, turning outward.

My eyes went dark. I thought I was totally blind. Then I realized, no, I could still see. But all I could see were vague lines between dark and light. I was practically blind, but not completely.

Almost blind. With hearing that was dim and distant, like listening through a door. Even scent was nothing special.

However, a new sense reared up to fill my brain. Touch! My nose was insanely alive and so sensitive to touch I could feel the air currents around me.

Deprived of vision and much of my hearing, I felt panic. I was supposed to go digging down in the ground like this? Blind? Half-deaf?

And yet ... I felt the earth beneath my shovel hands and my ratlike back legs, and scraping under my belly. My nose poked at the dirt and felt its texture, moistness, hardness.

It was certainly better underground. Safer. Oh yes, far safer underground.

Besides, I was hungry.

I began to dig.

From far away I heard a voice say, "Well, she's getting right down to business, huh?"

"It still looks like a rat to me."

I dug my claws into the dirt and shoved it back with my "hands." Then again. More. And now the desire to dig was very much stronger. I had to dig! I was surrounded by big, lumbering shapes of gray on gray. When they moved I could see the shifts in the light pattern.

Dig! I could feel the warmth of the earth calling to me. In some dim part of my mind I could almost form a picture of a cozy little hole, deep down, filled with comfortable grasses and twigs and scraps of garbage.

I could curl up there when I wasn't waddling through my tunnels. The tunnels where beetles might dig through and lay their eggs for me to eat. Where, in the absolute darkness, my sensitive nose would encounter the squirming squishi-ness of a plump, juicy earthworm.

Oh, yes, dig!

"You know, it occurs to me, maybe she's not in total control of this morph."

"Nah. Come on. You think a mole has strong enough instincts to take over Rachel's brain?"

"Look at the way she's digging."

"Hmm. Rachel? Hey, Rachel? How you doing down there?"

Dig and dig and dig. Now my upper body was down in the warm darkness of earth. Dig harder! Get all the way under. Darkness was safety. The safety of warm, moist earth pressing in all around.

"She's not answering. She's totally gone mole on us. I wouldn't have thought moles had that powerful a set of instincts. Okay, better grab her before she gets al! the way under."

Suddenly, I felt something grab me! It grabbed my tail. It was pulling me backward. I dug furiously with my shovel hands. I scrabbled at the dirt, but it was too powerful.

Up, up, up through the air! Exposed! Nothing around me but air, air, air! Emptiness!

"Hey, Rachel. It's me, Jake. Snap out of it. The mole brain has you."

I snapped out of it. It was a sensation like ... well, like emerging from a tunnel into daylight. I was back! I was me. Me, staring through those utterly useless mole eyes.

"Did not!" I said.

"Yeah, right," I heard Marco say.

"l was just trying to get on with it. Hey, I'm here to dig, right? So I was digging, jerk."

Jake put me back down by the shallow hole I'd made.

"Ooookay, Rachel. You were not having trouble. Everything was fine."

I went back to work. But now the earth didn't seem so inviting or warm.

Down and down I dug.

Till my entire body was in the dirt. And now I was no longer hiding beneath the mole's mind. I was a human being, digging blindly into the dirt.

Why should it have been terrifying? Why?

Was it the way the dirt pressed in all around me? The fact that I could not possibly turn around? I couldn't breathe! Only I could breathe. Yes, I was breathing. But that panic, that terror of suffocating in a dark place, kept rearing up. I could push it down, I could reason with myself, but that fear of suffocation was too strong.

I was buried alive.

Correction: I was burying myself alive.

Down I went, down and down. I knew I should be digging a vertical hole, but it was impossible. The mole couldn't dig that way. The best it could do was slope downward.

I dug. How long, I don't know. It seemed like a very long time.

And then, quite suddenly, I couldn't stand it anymore. I needed air! I tried to back up, but no! I couldn't move that way.

"Come on, Rachel. Get a grip, kid. Get a grip!" I said to myself. "Just dig a turnaround. That's it. A little more off the sides. Yeah. Hang in there."

No air! Oh, lord, I'm buried alive!

"No! No! Hold on. Keep digging out a turnaround." I scraped madly with my "hands," shoving the dirt back beneath my body to be shoved back by my hind legs.

And slowly a chamber began to appear. A hole a few inches wide on either side of me. I tried turning. Not yet. Dig some more. Dig in blind darkness.

Finally . . . yes! I could turn around. My sensitive nose felt the empty, open tunnel ahead of me. It was crumbly and far from perfect, but it was a tunnel.

I raced down it, squeezing through the tight spaces, desperate, desperate for air!

My nose emerged into light. It seemed blinding now.

"She's back," Cassie said. "Rachel, are you okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Fine," I lied.

"How far did you get? You were down there for twenty minutes."

Twenty minutes? No. It had been an hour at least.

"I . . . urn, I don't know." I tried to visualize the tunnel I'd never actually seen but only felt. How long was it? "1 guess it was, I don't know, probably only three feet."

"Three feet straight down?" Jake said with a whistle. "That's pretty good. The top of the Yeerk pool dome is probably what, fifty feet down maybe?"

"Not straight down," I said. "The mole can't dig straight down. It's just barely downhill. Maybe a foot deep."

"0h, man," Tobias groaned. "This is going to take us forever." We took one-hour shifts. Between shifts those of us who weren't digging or standing guard walked down to the Mickey D's and bought fries and Cokes.

Six hours of digging till we had each done our shift. The day was over.

We couldn't stay any longer. We had to head home.

"Someone should carry a string down in to see how far we got," Marco suggested.

No one volunteered. No one even moved. We were a haggard, unhappy-looking bunch of kids. Sweating and pale from the stress of fear and the constant morphing.

"I'll do it," I said. "It's my turn."

I morphed and Cassie tied the end of a string around my tail.

Down into the tunnels again. We'd each gone as far as we could, then dug a turnaround. Six turnarounds. I counted them as I passed each one by.

I would have been sweating if I were human. It was hot and close. Very close. Like being in a coffin. That image kept coming up. Like being in a coffin. Like being buried alive. Like you wanted to kick and scream to get out, only no one would hear you because you were underground. Buried alive.

Then my nose touched a wall. The end. I had reached the end of the tunnel. You'd think I'd have been relieved. But now the pressure to get out out OUT drove me to the edge of panic.

I could barely control myself. Barely keep from screaming.

I raced back along that tunnel as if something were chasing me. Was that light up ahead? No, I'd only passed three turnarounds. Or was it four?

Finally, I poked my snout up out of the ground, crawled free of the hole, and began to demorph instantly.

Ax was in his own body, having been in human morph too long. He measured out the string I'd carried down the hole. "Would you like the measurement in feet or in meters?"

I was human enough to be able to see Marco roll his eyes. "Whatever."

"The total length of the tunnel is approximately forty-one feet long. I believe the slope ratio is about six to one. One foot down for every six feet of tunnel. That would mean we tunneled down approximately six point eight feet."

I was emerging into my human body now and still trying to shake off the unholy willies. "Six lousy feet!"

"Closer to seven lousy feet," Ax corrected.

"0h, man," Tobias moaned. "lf we're right and we have to dig down fifty feet, that would take us a week. You've got to be kidding! I'm a bird. I have no business being in a tunnel."

I almost agreed. In fact, I almost said, "Forget it! I'm outta here."

But I didn't. In fact, I was the strongest voice for going forward. See, ! wasn't going to let the claustrophobia scare me. I wasn't going to let fear dictate what I did.