Текст книги "Animorphs - 17 - The Underground"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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Or maybe I was just a fool.

We got better at digging as we became more experienced. But then we found ourselves running into rocky levels no mole was designed to dig through. We had to figure out ways around the rocks. Long, time-consuming ways around boulders.

And we could only dig after school. We'd bring our homework and sit in that stifling shed and quiz each other on history or science. Ax would stand there, listening gravely to the history, and laughing at the primitive nature of our science.

One by one we'd go down that hole. We timed it out so the next person was always in morph and ready to go. Four more days we dug. Till Cassie came back up and said, "I think we're blocked. It's solid rock."

"We are not blocked," I said. "We have not been doing all this just to end up blocked. There has to be a way."

So down I went. Like an idiot. Like I was all excited about digging the stupid tunnel.

Ax had calculated we were twenty-five feet down. Down through loose topsoil and clay and gravel. Down and down I scurried, pushing ahead with my little back feet, always clearing the tunnel of fallen dirt with my spade feet.

I reached the end. The darkness was so absolute that no eye could see.

Let alone a mole's eye.

My nose touched the end of the tunnel. I began to dig. Rock. I moved left. Rock. I started thinking, hoping almost, that Cassie had been right. No more digging. No more tunnel. No more being buried alive.

But then I found it. The seam between rocks. My nose felt it. I dug away some dirt and the seam grew. Yes, there was an opening.

I hesitated. Did I really have to tell the others? They would take my word for it if I said Cassie was right. No one else was going to come down here to check. No one liked this any more than I did.

I dug some more. And then . . .

"What?"

Air! A breeze.

"No way."

But it was a breeze. Faint, and smelling heavy and damp and nasty. But a definite breeze. Air was flowing up between the rocks.

"Hey, guys?" I called up in thought-speak. But they were out of range.

No answer came.

I dug away more dirt and now the breeze was stronger still. There was enough space for me to push my body through. But I sensed emptiness beyond.

I turned around and raced back to the surface.

"l think I hit a cave or something," I said. "Cassie was right, it's rocky. But there's a breeze coming up between the rocks." Jake checked his watch. "Too late for today. We'll hit it tomorrow. It's Saturday. We'll have more time."

So on Saturday we were back. Rested and refreshed. Or as rested and refreshed as you can be after a night of nightmares where you're trapped in a coffin screaming, "Let me out, I'm not dead!"

This time we all went down together. We dug out a larger area around the fissure in the rock. We made it large enough for all of us to fit. And somehow, as creepy as it still was, it was more or less comforting to know that everyone was down there with me.

Until it occurred to me that now there was no one on the surface to rescue us. The tunnel could collapse, we could be trapped . . . what could I do, morph to human? Under twenty-five feet of dirt?

Everyone took turns digging away the last of the dirt. Our noses told us we were standing around a crack that went down and down into the rock.

"This just gets to be more and more fun, doesn't it?" Marco said sarcastically. "Now it's solid rock."

"Better than digging through dirt," I said.

"0h, yeah? Guess again. We're moles. If a dirt tunnel collapses on us we can dig our way out. What do we do if rocks collapse in on us?" He was right. I had to force myself to stay very still and not start running. If I started running, I'd never stop.

"lf you're scared, I'll go in," I said.

"I'm scared," Marco confirmed. "Help yourself," There must be something kind of liberating, just being able to say "I'm scared" like it's no big deal. I can't do that. I don't know why. I just can't.

I pushed my sleek mole body down into the rock. It was rough, unworn rock. Rock that had been split open by pressure. I shoved forward. The path twisted and turned, but not too much.

If I demorphed in here, my human body would be a hundred times too big.

What would happen? Would I become a part of the rock? Would I be able to scream and scream with no one hearing me, no one able to help?

"Get a grip!" I ordered myself. "Stop torturing yourself. It's going to be okay."

Suddenly . . .

"Aaaahhhh!"

I was falling! Falling blind.

Trailing!

"Aaaahhhh!"

"Rachel!"

WHUMPF!

"Rachel! What's the matter?" Cassie's thought-speak voice.

I landed on my back. I landed on something almost soft. Something that reeked in my mole nose.

i was still in total, absolute darkness. I couldn't see anything. But I knew I was in a vast, open space. The Yeerk pool? No, of course not.

There would be light there.

But definitely an open space. Large. Quite large.

And then I realized I was not alone.

I didn't know what they were, but I felt their presence above me. Many, many of them.

"Rachel!" It was Jake now. "Answer if you can."

"l'm okay," I said. "!...! guess I fell into some kind of a cave."

"Do you see a guy in a cape and a really cool car?" Marco asked.

"What?" I was too preoccupied to care about his dumb jokes.

"The Batcave," he said. "l'm thinking you fell into the Batcave." It wasn't until that moment that I realized whose presence I felt above me.

"Actually, Marco, I think maybe it is a bat cave. Come on down. You can jump. It's a nice, soft landing on a bat-poop mattress." One by one they came, dropping down beside me. And soon we were six blind moles wallowing in mostly dried bat guano.

Now that I was out of the tunnel, out of the confined space, I wanted to laugh. "Well, this is pretty glorious, huh? We have tunneled our way into a major bat-poop deposit. A whole week, and we have reached a bat cave. You know what I think? I think this whole thing has been cursed.

And I think it's all my fault. I should have let that Edelman guy just splat on the concrete."

"We can't back out now," Marco said. "l have thirty-six boxes of maple-and-ginger instant oatmeal at home. In easy-open single serving pouches."

"We should demorph," Cassie said.

"Why?" Tobias asked. "So we can really enjoy the lovely ambience?"

"l was thinking since we're in a bat cave, maybe we should go into our own bat morphs," Cassie said.

"Oh. I don't have a bat morph," Tobias said.

"Easily fixed in here," Cassie said with a laugh. "l'll bet there are a few hundred thousand bats hanging from the roof of this cave. Just hanging around and waiting for someone to come along and acquire their DNA."

"You're awfully cheerful," Jake grumbled. "We're in a cave way underground with no way out except a mole tunnel we can't reach anymore^

"No, no, no," Cassie said. "Wrong. Don't you realize? The bats fly out of here at dusk. Out. As in out? As in exitl"

"Hey! She's right!" I yelled. "We won't be buried alive in here. Not that I was worried or anything."

"No, we'll just be buried in bat poop," Marco muttered. "Let's morph to bat like Cassie said."

Yes, bat was a good idea. If you're going to be in a bat cave, best to be a bat. But first we had to pass through our own natural bodies.

And oh, was that not fun.

You think it's grim being a mole in a bat cave? Try being a human. For one thing, the cave was less high than we'd thought. For another thing, we all passed through the same helpless stage where we had big, swollen human bodies with tiny little feet and arms.

"Ah, MAN!" Marco moaned. "Buried in bat -"

"Guano," Cassie said, supplying the word.

"Yeah, guano. That's what I was gonna say. Guano."

"Thisissoguh-ROSS!" I yelled.

My arms and legs reappeared and I had to stick my palms down in the stuff to raise up. The only good thing was that the awfulness of the grossness completely distracted me from the claustrophobia.

"What are you whining about, Rachel?" Tobias snapped grumpily. "Try having feathers in this stuff."

I raised myself up. I stood up. I raised my head. And that's when I made the discovery about the cave not being as high as we'd thought.

You see, my head was entirely surrounded by soft, warm, fuzzy bats.

There was really only one thing to do.

"Marco," I said. "Be sure and stretch out. Up on your tiptoes now."

"Aaaahhhh!" he yelped. "Oh, really funny, Rachel. That was so mature!"

"What, I should suffer and you shouldn't, just because you're short?"

And then, weird as it seems, we all burst out giggling. Thirty feet underground in a bat cave so dark you might as well be blind, lost, scared, and smeared with bat guano, we got the giggles.

Here. Have a bat," I said. I held one for Tobias. I wasn't afraid of bats. I'd been one.

"Thanks."

"Watch out, he'll eat it," Marco said.

"You know," Jake said in a conversational tone as we waited for Tobias to acquire the bat, "from the point where Edelman said 'maple and ginger oatmeal,' I should have known this was going to end stupidly."

"Instant maple and ginger oatmeal," Cassie said.

"Battles that involve oatmeal are just never going to end up being historic, you know?" Jake went on. "Gettysburg? No major oatmeal involve-ment. The Battle of Midway? Neither side used oatmeal. Desert Storm?

No oatmeal."

"Excuse me, but what is oatmeal?" Ax asked.

"It's a kind of food," Cassie explained.

"Is it tasty?"

"You can think about food here? Here?" Marco said. "In bat-poop land?"

"Battle of Bunker Hill? No oatmeal used by the British, no oatmeal used by the Americans," Jake went on. "D-Day? No mention of oatmeal."

"Okay, I'm ready," Tobias said.

"Let's do it, and then let's get out of this place," I said.

I focused my mind on the bat. The bat DNA had come from a common brown bat. Not a very big animal. More like a mouse with wings.

It was a strange sensation. I was shrinking. Probably. But I couldn't see anything. So I couldn't see myself getting smaller. Couldn't see any of the changes.

In the absolute darkness I was left with just my sense of hearing. I heard things I seldom noticed. I heard my thick, human bones grinding and suddenly squishing as they went liquid. I heard a sound like my stomach rumbling from hunger. Only it was the sound of my stomach and all my internal organs shifting and moving. Some organs shrank. Some basically disappeared. All of it was happening inside me at a point when I didn't even know if I was five feet tall or five inches.

I reached with my hands to touch my face and "see" how much I'd morphed.

But my hands were restricted. They were weirdly jointed. And when I moved them I heard a faint sound like leather being folded.

I flapped my arms. Yes, I had wings. The paper-thin leather of bat wings.

And then, I felt that most vital of bat powers: I felt the echolocation.

I fired an ultrasonic blast. Sound waves pitched higher than any human ear would ever hear. But I heard them. They came bouncing back to me and I heard every distorted, twisted, shattered echo.

"Oh!" I said in amazement. I'd been a bat only once before, and only for a short time. I'd forgotten the stunning array of information that comes from echolocating.

It was as if I'd been blind and allowed to see.

Not "see" the way humans see. But to see shapes, edges, openness, and narrowness. I fired another burst and I "saw" the edges of a thousand bats clustered above us. I saw their tiny, doglike faces and their big feathery ears as they hung down with wings folded demurely.

It was as if all the world were drawn with pen and ink. Edges and outlines, no hint of color. And each picture was only a flash, only there as long as the echoes lasted.

Now the others all began echolocating, and I redoubled my own efforts.

Yes! I could see the cave. A comic book drawing of a cave, thin lines and thick ones.

I flapped my wings and lifted off heavily, rising from the floor of the cave. I took a quick turn around, absolutely confident of where I was flying.

"It's not quite like seeing, but it beats being blind," Cassie said, sighing with relief.

I realized the others had been as stressed as I was by the utter darkness.

"To the Batmobile, Robin," Marco said.

"How about if we just get out of this place?" Tobias suggested.

"I'm with that," Jake said.

We flew. Through the cave, which wound and twisted, always beneath hanging bat stalactites, and above a carpet of bat-guano stalagmites.

I could feel the way out. I could feel the slight changes of air pressure, the changes of temperature that showed the way out. But then . . .

"You guys feel that?" I asked.

"It's coming from our left," Ax said. "My echolocation is showing an opening. But not an opening to the outside."

"Oh, man," I moaned. I could feel the near– ness of the cave opening. But I could also feel this other exit. I had a pretty good sense of where that second exit might lead.

"We could just go home," Jake said. He was offering us all a way out. Go home, forget about it for now. He didn't want to "order" us to go on if we weren't up for it.

Everyone in a group has a role to play. At least that's how it always works out. My role was to say, "Let's do it. Let's go. That's what we came here for."

But I was tired. And I'd had a really, really bad few days digging down to this stupid cave.

So I said, "Let's do it. That's what we came here for." Sometimes it's hard to get out of a role once you've started playing the part.

It was a vertical crack in solid rock. In places it was no more than eight inches wide. At its best it was a foot wide.

With wing tips scraping the rock wall, we flew. Through a world seen only in echolocating sketches, we flew.

"Cool! This is so Star Wars!" I said, genuinely enjoying it. "Remember when they're attacking the Death Star and -"

Suddenly, the crack plunged downward. Down ten feet and then -

"Whoa ho!"

We blew out into a world of light! I could see again. People think bats are. blind, but they're not. I could see a vast, open area lit with stadium lights down below us.

We fluttered in a circle at the top of a dome. The crack we'd entered through was high up, almost at the very peak of the dome. And down below us was the Yeerk pool.

"Well," Jake said, "we found our way into the Yeerk pool."

"Yeah. Great," Cassie said darkly. "Now what?"

"Now we figure out how to get that oatmeal in here and feed it to a bunch of human-Controllers," Tobias said.

"You know . . . maybe we don't have to give it to human-Controllers," Cassie said. "l don't know why it didn't occur to me before. But it's the Yeerk that can't resist the stuff, right? So why don't we dump it right in the Yeerk poo! itself?"

"Would it work?" Tobias wondered. "l thought all Yeerks ate was Kandrona rays. Do they even have mouths?"

"Yes," Ax said. "Yeerks have mouths. Or what humans would think of as mouths. Actually, if I remember my exo-biology classes, and sadly, I sometimes -"

"Fell asleep," I said. "Yeah, we know. You didn't like exo-biology class."

"l didn't fall asleep," Ax said, sounding injured. "i merely let my mind wander, and became very calm and restful and not completely alert."

"Did you snore when you got all calm and restful and not completely alert?"

"The point is, on occasion I would pay some attention in class. And I believe that Yeerks have something called osmosis nodes. It's what they use to absorb Kandrona rays, but they absorb other nutrients as well.

They absorb from the liquid of the Yeerk pool."

"So if we dump enough instant maple and ginger oatmeal in this Yeerk pool, they should absorb it, right?" Jake asked.

"Yes, Prince Jake. At least, I think so. Maybe."

"0h, good, I just love risking my life for a "maybe,"" Marco said.

"Hey," Tobias said. "l think we have company. Over there." I looked around. I saw two shiny steel balls. Each was about the size of a beach ball. My echolocation confirmed their size. And they were moving toward us through the air.

"Hunter robots!" Ax yelled. "We should leave!"

"Why?" I asked.

But at that very moment, I had my answer.

TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW!

Three narrow Dracon beams fired from the balls. I felt a sharp pain in my right wing. I smelled something burning. And when I looked, I saw a neat, round hole the size of a quarter burned through the leather of my wing.

"Okay, let's leave," I said. I turned and headed for the crack, with all the others alongside me.

TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW!

"Aaarrgghh!"

Tobias! He was hit. He was falling, tumbling downward, down to the Yeerk pool below us. I had a weird flash of poor Mr. Edelman falling, and then down I went after Tobias.

Bats aren't all that fast in flight. Fortunately, Tobias had a lot of experience flying. He managed to use his one good wing to slow his fall.

I caught him and grabbed with my tiny but strong little bat feet. Ax and Jake were there in a flash and we flapped madly, hauling him upward.

But the hunter robots were closing in on us.

TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW!

"Aaahhh! I've been hit!" Ax yelled. His flying weakened. It was no longer even possible to get Tobias back up to the crack.

"We're bats," Tobias gasped. "I can hang." I realized what he was telling me. If we could get him to the rocks, any rocks, he could latch on and hang. Not exactly a solution, but the only thing we could do.

Down swooped Jake, just in time. He slammed into us deliberately, pushing us toward the sloping rock ceiling. Tobias scrabbled madly and managed to grab some rock with his feet.

The hunter robots came on, almost leisurely. Maybe they had enough intelligence to realize that they had us cold.

"Ax! Do those things have any weak points?" Marco yelled.

Cassie and Marco had flown off through all this. I couldn't blame them.

But I had wondered . . .

"Visual aiming system," Ax groaned. "A lens. Like a human camera lens."

"I see it," Cassie yelled.

BONK!

BONK!

My echolocation "saw" the tiny rocks go flying. They were like bombs dropped from dive-bombers. Cassie and Marco had each grabbed small rocks, dived toward the robots, and released them.

One must have hit. One of the robots began to veer away like it was lost.

But the other was just twenty feet away when it fired. I swept my good wing over Tobias, trying to shield him.

TSEEEEEWWW! TSEEEEEWWW!

The Dracon beam burned the wing off. Clear off. I had a stump of a bat arm. And I fell like a stone.

Down, down, down through the damp air.

Down to the Yeerk pool.

I fell.

I saw Jake and Cassie come for me. But I knew. I knew they couldn't make it.

"Back off, you idiots!" I screamed. And then I hit.

SPUH-LOOSH!

I landed on my back. It knocked the wind out of me. I gasped for air.

But I was under the surface.

I was in liquid the color of lead. But living, seething water. The Yeerks were everywhere! All around me.

I bobbed to the surface. I tried to fire my echolocation, but the liquid kept rolling over me in sluggish little swells.

I was in the Yeerk pool!

That awful fact was like an explosion in my brain. They were everywhere! All around me! They would get me now. I couldn't escape. I flapped my single sodden wing, but all I managed to do was churn the water a little.

I started to call out to my friends. But no. No. They would kill themselves trying to rescue me. No.

Only . . . what if the Yeerks made me a Controller? I would betray all my friends. I wouldn't be able not to.

They can only make you a Controller if you de-morph, I told myself. They can't do anything to a bat. Too small a brain for a Yeerk slug. Stay in morph.

But then I began to notice something. The Yeerks didn't seem to be paying any attention to me. It was like they didn't even notice the presence of a floundering bat.

Maybe they didn't.

Those hunter robots weren't there specifically to kill us. They must have been programmed to attack any animal. The Yeerks were being careful. They knew we'd infiltrated the Yeerk pool before. So they had brought the Bio-scans to the entrances. And they had activated the hunter robots. But a lot of innocent animals must have been fried over time. Other bats had probably wandered in.

So I was probably not the first animal to end up in the Yeerk pool with a Dracon beam wound.

THUD.

A Yeerk bumped into me.

I froze. Nothing.

SLOOOP.

A Yeerk brushed against me. Nothing.

It hit me then. "Oh, man. They're blind. They can't see when they're in the pool. They can't see without using some host's eyes." So how did they find their way back to their host when it was time?

Smell? Sound? Some other sense?

I looked up and saw the domed rock roof so high up above. I looked for my friends, but I couldn't see them. Maybe they were safe. Maybe not.

If they had been taken prisoner I had to save them. But I couldn't thought-speak. They'd probably assume I'd been badly injured. Or worse.

If I called them, they might be destroyed trying to save me.

What should I do?

If the Yeerks couldn't see a bat, could they see a human? I could morph to shark and go rampaging through the pool, eating the vile slugs till one of the Controllers on shore saw my dorsal fin and burned me.

There was a vaguely circular current in the pool.

I was drifting around in a lazy semicircle. Coming closer and closer to that evil steel pier where they dragged the hosts and thrust their heads under the water to allow the Yeerks to re-enter.

Under the pier! If I was going to demorph, that was the place.

Closer, closer I drifted. Closer, and I could hear the shouts. The cries. The screams. The utter despair.

"No! No! Let me go, you have no right! Let me go, I have children who -"

The voice was cut off. The woman's head had been shoved brutally down under the surface. And seconds later, she stood up, perfectly calm. A Controller once more.

I could see the pier clearly, although from a very low angle. Bored Hork-Bajir-Controllers dragged unwilling humans and unwilling Hork-Bajir to the end of the pier, kicked their legs out from under them, and thrust their heads into the pool.

It was just a day's work for the Hork-Bajir. The threats and pleading meant nothing. They'd heard it all before. Hundreds of times. Thousands and thousands of times.

The idea of morphing to a shark and laying waste through the Yeerk pool was starting to seem better and better. How I hated the foul slugs that surged and frolicked around me.

But that would be a suicide mission. Maybe there was still some way to stay alive.

The pier was coming closer. It was very low, just inches above the water surface.

What should I do?

Well, Rachel, I thought, you sure don't want to end your life as a one-winged bat.

I began to demorph.

There, floating amidst the enemy, i began to emerge back into human form.

I was under the pier!

I reached, hoping I had something like a hand. Rough, stubby fingers scraped along the steel underside of the pier.

I thrust a face that was half-human and half-bat up into the three inches of air space.

I could see up through the gaps in the steel planks. I saw Hork-Bajir feet and the short Hork-Bajir tail go by overhead.

I saw human feet being dragged.

"Please, no. Please, no. Please, no," the man whimpered.

I was larger now, a lot larger, so more and more Yeerk slugs were banging into me or brushing past me.

Oh, for my hammerhead shark's razor teeth.

But that wasn't the way to survive.

They human, I began to morph again.

I needed to be right at the end of the pier for it to work. I was going to get very, very small. The distances had to be small, too.

I was going to do the one morph I'd sworn never to do again.

I shrank. As I shrank I pulled myself closer to the end of the pier.

When my arms became useless, I paddled.

I shrank and shrank till the low roof of the pier over my head seemed miles away.

An extra set of legs extruded from my midriff.

Antennae shot from my forehead.

My body was severely squeezed into three segments. I was an hourglass with a head.

My skin grew hard as fingernails. Just like a cockroach's exoskeleton. But I was not morphing a roach. ! was going much, much smaller. A cockroach would be visible. A cockroach would be an elephant compared to the animal I was becoming.

I was less than an inch long and still shrinking. Becoming the most terrifying animal I had ever become.

I was becoming an ant.

I fought my way continually to the surface. I couldn't afford to be trapped under the water. And soon, my natural buoyancy and small size kept me riding easily atop the swells.

I took a last look around with my fading eyes. I knew what was coming. I knew I'd be almost blind. I needed to pick a direction and know where I was.

A huge pillar, fifty times as big as a redwood, loomed up in front of me. Right in front of me.

My eyes went off like someone had thrown a switch. I was nearly blind.

More blind than a mole. All I could see were vague, distorted lines between dark and light. Shadows. But I knew where I was.

My six ant legs splayed out. They pressed down on a rubbery surface – the water. It was like trying to walk on a trampoline. And my legs kept poking through the surface.

But mostly I could do it. I could walk on the water. Or at least stand. Forward movement was very difficult.

Fortunately, the water did that for me. A swell came along. I felt it well up beneath me, a vast, powerful wave that set me rocketing up and up on its crest.

I was surfing the Yeerk pool.

SPLUSH!

The wave crashed against the pylon. A steel wall loomed up before me, nothing but darkness to my ant eyes. I grabbed. I set my tiny claws grabbing wildly, grabbing at anything solid.

And then the water fell away.beneath me. I had grabbed the steel pylon!

Tiny surface irregularities, the very grain of the metal itself, were all I needed.

Up I raced. Up to escape the next swell.

It splashed. I felt the vibrations as the water hit the pylon. Felt the air move as it was displaced by the tiny, but huge-to-me, upward surge.

The top of the water swept my back feet, but I had four more legs firmly attached, and I powered them with all my human will.

I felt the ant's mindless, machine instincts. They wouldn't be any trouble. I had morphed the ant before. I was prepared. Besides, the ant was far from anything familiar. Far from the world of smell it inhabited.

Up I went, climbing and climbing. Always upward.

Ahead of me I sensed warmth. Body warmth and the smells of a living thing. Some poor creature, human or Hork-Bajir, or some foul, vile Taxxon, was being reinfested.

I raced forward, hanging upside down as I ran. Grabbing the encrustations and irregularities of the underside of the pier.

Upside down, inches from the water, I ran and ran and didn't even slow down when I found myself no longer on steel but on fabric.

Then, up and up! I felt myself flying upward at an insane speed. But still I clung to the ropes that were threads in a cotton shirt.

The host had been reinfested. I was on a Controller. I was on his shirt, scuttling for cover beneath a damp collar.

"Hah! Let's see the hunter robots find me here," I said triumphantly.

I was alive. I had escaped from the Yeerk pool itself!

But I couldn't be elated. I didn't know what had happened to my friends.

For all I knew, they had not made it.

I was riding safe and secure, clutching to twisted cotton threads the size of bridge cables.

"Cheap shirt," I muttered to no one. I could feel the roughness of the fabric.

Eventually, I was going to have to jump. Hopefully, the person I was on would go into one of the buildings. Hopefully, he was not going to head straight back out of the Yeerk pool to the outside world.

I didn't want to leave the place. Not yet. I had to find out what had happened to the others.

I felt a breeze blowing across me. I felt the fabric ripple. We were walking. How fast, how far? No way to know.

Had the quality of the light changed? Impossible to say. I had to take a shot in the dark. Had to guess.

I raced out from under the collar and headed uphill. I climbed up onto what I assumed was a shoulder.

Could I do this? Could ants jump? Only one way to find out. I ran out to the end of the shoulder. I carefully released the grip of each of my six legs. One by one. Then I crouched and pushed off.

I guess the movement of the person who'd been carrying me was enough to make it work. I didn't so much jump as I rolled off the edge.

I fell! Forever. I swear it took me ten seconds to hit the ground, and in that time I tumbled, totally out of control, mostly blind. I had no way of knowing when I would hit. And even though I knew an animal as small as an ant wouldn't be hurt by the fall, it was frightening.

POOMPF!

I hit. I rolled onto my legs. Where was I? I felt around with my antennae. A smooth surface.

Okay. Fine. I was on a floor. Where I could easily be stepped on.

Great. Now to find someplace dark where I could demorph without being seen.

I raced across the floor, totally unaware of where I might be. Then, darkness. But what did it mean? Was it a different room? Or had I just crawled under a cupboard or something?

I ran on for a while, making sure that the space I was in was large enough. Then I began to demorph.

It's a long, long way up from the ground going from ant to human. But my eyes didn't return till I was halfway demorphed. I looked around. Dark, but not the dark of the cave. There was dim, gray light here. It outlined sharp edges and right angles.

A storeroom. There were boxes piled all around me. They seemed to be made of blue plastic. I leaned against one as I finished returning to my own body.

Human again! I looked around. My eyes had had plenty of time to adjust to the gloom. There was writing on some of the boxes. But not any alphabet I'd ever seen.

There was a square pad outlined in red, just an inch on each side.

"Well, why not?" I muttered. I pressed the pad. Instantly the top of the box came loose with a sound like a vacuum seal breaking. It sounded like when someone opens a can of coffee.

I looked inside. Then I smiled. I reached in and lifted out a hand-size Dracon beam.

"Cool."

The grip was weird. Designed for Hork-Bajir hands. But that was okay.

Right by my thumb there was a slide. It went up and down. "Power settings," I decided. I had to use my middle finger to reach the trigger.