Chapter 10: Cassie

On Wednesday, the voice of Elfangor's brother fell silent.

I was in the small cave I'd discovered in my first day, among the shattered boulders of a steep hillside deep within the forest. It was twenty miles from the nearest human structure—almost forty, by road—but I still did a sweep of the entire area in osprey morph and stayed as far back into the darkness as I could manage. In the three days since I'd left the others, I'd seen almost a dozen hikers on the nearby trails, and a handful going cross-country. I didn't want to have to think about what would happen if one of them spotted an alien—or worse, caught me mid-morph—so I always made sure there was no one nearby.

I'd been checking the distress beacon each day, at sunrise and sunset. It was almost comforting, a way to stay connected to the others while I waited up in the woods. Officially, I was supposed to be finding or building some kind of base camp—a place where the others might live if their cover was blown, or where we might bring my parents once we captured them and starved the Yeerks out of their heads.

But I didn't really know anything about camping or construction or survival skills. My dad took us out into the woods all the time, but for him it was more about being with nature, and not so much about living in it. We always brought tents, lighters, prepackaged food—I knew a little bit about how to find paths, and which roots and mushrooms were good to eat, but I'd spent a lot more time identifying bird species than rubbing sticks together.

I'd spent an hour in grizzly morph in that first afternoon, digging the rotting muck out of the cave and bringing in pine boughs to make a kind of floor, but after that I'd run out of ideas. So I'd simply kept morphing, dipping in and out of the amazing range of bodies at my disposal, wandering the forest as a wolf, as a gorilla, as a mouse. I slithered my way up to the treetops in the body of a Burmese python, glided back down on the winglike membranes of a flying squirrel, dug through the riverbanks with the paws of a star-nosed mole, and defied the rushing currents with the reckless speed of an otter.

A part of me knew I was hiding. Running away from the pain, hoping not to think about it. I hadn't morphed into the snipe or the elephant since passing them on to the others—it was too easy, wearing those bodies, to remember every detail of Sunday night, to hear the crack of my mother's shin and see the blank emotionlessness of my father's Controlled face.

Maybe that makes me a coward. The part of me that spoke in Rachel's voice certainly thought so. Each minute I spent riding the thermals or galloping through the meadows was a minute my parents were spending locked inside their own brains, unable to escape. Each rush of euphoria was a betrayal, and the guilt of each morph made the next one more inevitable as I spiraled downward, orbiting a black hole I couldn't bear to look at.

It was my fault. But what good did it do to sit around obsessing over it? Jake and the others had banished me—sent me to the woods where I wouldn't be in the way, wouldn't be a risk, wouldn't be putting everyone else in danger. There was literally nothing I could do except practice morphing.

So I did. And each day, twice a day, I returned to the cave. To Elfangor's body, and to the reminder that I was not the only one alone and waiting.

I hadn't realized just how much I'd started to lean on that reminder—how much I needed the voice of Elfangor's brother to be there. Its sudden absence hit me like a physical blow—as the seconds stretched out in silence, I felt the strength drain from my Andalite limbs, felt my tail drooping as I dropped down to all sixes.

Elfangor. Brother. Help me.

I whispered the words in my own head, a pale imitation.

Maybe—maybe they came to rescue him. Other survivors, or another Andalite ship.

Or maybe he'd escaped on his own—figured out a way off whatever island or out of whatever deep ocean trench he'd ended up in. He was an Andalite warrior, after all. He had morphing power—thought-speak—advanced weapons I probably couldn't even imagine.

But then again, so did the Yeerks. Visser Three, the monster at the heart of the nightmare, the one that had torn Elfangor apart right in front of us.

I'd spent almost as much effort trying not to think about that memory. The way the Visser's body had—had unfolded, bloodblack plates of armor sliding forth from his chest like a flower blossoming in time-lapse. The way even his own minions had hesitated, had shuffled back, nervously fingering their guns. The spray of mist that I thought I'd seen, hovering against the night sky for just a split second after the jaws snapped shut—

I had felt the raw power of the Andalite brain, tapped into it the same way I tapped into the elephant's hearing or the wolf's sense of smell. It was like being plugged into a computer—in Elfangor's body, I could follow three lines of thought at once, multiply four-digit numbers together in a second, track everything that was going on around me with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. For brief stretches of time, I could play at being a genius.

The Visser was a genius. There hadn't been time for a long history lesson, in those few brief minutes on the bridge of Elfangor's ruined ship. But there had been enough time for him to tell us about Alloran—about the changes the war-prince had been making to the Andalite military, the brilliance of his tactical theory. How he'd spurred a renaissance of curiosity and exploration, drawing an entire generation into space. How his insight had led to Seerow's breakthrough and the development of morphing technology. How, even after his Fall, the doctrines he'd left behind had guided the Andalite fleet to victory in the battle over Gara—though only, Elfangor said, because the Visser himself had not been present.

Taking Alloran had been the opening move of the war, the Yeerks' first and most successful gambit. Every triumph they'd had since then had hinged upon his aptitude for war. If Elfangor's brother was dead—and what else could his sudden silence mean?—the odds were that Visser Three was the reason why.

And it was Visser Three that we had to beat, if I wanted to get my parents back.

I could sense myself slipping into despair, into the sick, overwhelmed fog that had hung over me since Sunday night. The war was just so big—even now, when it had only just begun. The Yeerks had a thousand slaves already, and I didn't even know how to make a campfire without my dad's help. Visser Three was an actual evil villain, and I hadn't even had the presence of mind to knock my mother unconscious.

If I had, my dad might have been there with me.

I wondered if the Yeerk inside him was letting him take care of the animals—if the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic was important enough to keep going, as cover.

Stop it. Stop this. Stop moping around and DO something, Cassie!

Taking in a deep breath through the Andalite's folded nostrils, I tried to gather my resolve, to lend weight to the part of me that was burning to set my parents free instead of the part that said it was all already over. But no matter how small that second voice shrank, I could never quite get it to go away.

Wearily, I pressed myself back up off the floor of the cave, my tail lashing as it counterbalanced my heavy torso, keeping me from toppling forward. I clenched Elfangor's seven-fingered fists, looking down at them with the super-3D vision that came along with having four eyes. Below me, my hooves smelled/tasted the acrid needles of the pine boughs, took an experimental bite and closed in disgust.

Good night, brother, I whispered silently.

On a sudden impulse, I reached out with my tail blade, tapped it gently against the stone of the cave wall. It made a small sound, like hitting two sticks together. I struck a little harder, leaving a scratch mark, and then harder still, watching tiny flecks of rock scatter into the darkness.

With a few swift, sure strokes, I carved a pair of figures into the wall—four legs, two arms, furred four-eyed bodies and long, sinuous tails. Behind them, I traced a simple, bare horizon and a single shining sun.

It wasn't enough, for a warrior who had given his life to buy us time. It wasn't enough for his living, breathing brother, who'd crossed half a galaxy only to spend his last few days in lonely despair. I had no idea how Andalites remembered their dead, no idea what sort of words I should say.

But it was all I could think of, so I turned away and demorphed.

Focusing my thoughts, I applied a little pressure—felt my thoughts slide—felt the corresponding mental click—and watched from within as the red-tailed hawk came to life. It sprang from the ground, flapping powerfully in the cool morning air, taking us up into the trees where it perched near the top of a pine, looking out over the crystal blue lake.

I would never, ever, ever get bored of flying. Even in the midst of my despair, the feeling of air beneath my wings, the sky stretched all around me and the earth so green and alive below—

Like clockwork, the guilt kicked in, and I hunched and ruffled my feathers, my body spasming slightly as my instructions conflicted with those of the hawk brain.

During the first few days, I'd spent a lot of time trying to disappear—to vanish inside the morphs, really become a horse or a bear or a raccoon or an owl. It had seemed like a better option than going around in endless circles inside my own head.

But I'd found that it wasn't that easy. The animal brain seemed to be there, under the surface, but it didn't have freedom of movement. There were controls, safeguards, blocks—I could tap into the hawk's instincts and experiences for things like knowing how to bank and soar, but I couldn't just not be in control. Even when the instincts took over—like with Tobias and the mouse—there was still some level at which the body needed me to provide it with energy. It was like I was the battery, and without my participation, the system wouldn't run. I could stand there all day thinking go on, do your thing and it would have no more effect than trying to raise my arm by telling it to.

After hours of fruitless straining, though, I'd discovered a workaround—a kind of mental switch that unlocked the controls, letting the animal mind take over. It was like the morphing equivalent of an autopilot—I could still see and hear, could resume control in an instant, but in the meantime the body would run itself, without any need for input from me.

Which was good, because I had no idea how to hunt for squirrels.

Taking off once more, the hawk body began to circle, rising and rising on a column of hot air as the morning sun began to warm the forest. I could sense its attention darting around, feel its eyes—our eyes—tracking each tiny movement in the landscape below, our wings responding to changes in the breeze with shifts as subtle as moving a single feather.

There was a meadow about a mile from the cave, a few minutes' flight north of the lake. The red-tail liked to hunt there, waiting in the trees around the perimeter as it considered its next move. Reaching the peak of its spiral, it turned its beak toward the grassy patch and began to glide, angling effortlessly through the air.

Since discovering the autopilot switch, I'd been wondering about other aspects of the morphing technology. In the car, with my mother, I had managed to control the shape and speed of the transformation, which seemed to imply that there might be other controls or settings or options that we could access. There would be a lot of power in being able to do partial morphs—or combined ones—or in being able to fiddle with the acquiring process.

If I acquired two different squirrels, and visualized something that looked like a mix between them, what would happen?

For that matter, what if I could control which genes the morphing technology was choosing to flip? I'd read articles about paleobiologists who were trying to create a dinosaur by interfering with the development of ordinary chicken embryos.

There was a part of me that very much wanted to be wearing the body of a Tyrannosaurus Rex the next time I encountered Visser Three.

Arriving at the meadow, I watched as the hawk folded our wings and plunged us toward the treetops, flaring at the last second and coming in to perch on a thin branch a hundred feet off the ground. There was another hawk at the opposite end of the meadow—its individual feathers as sharp in my vision as if I was looking at them through a magnifying glass—but it made no move to defend its territory. There was plenty of prey for everyone, rabbits and mice and squirrels and voles, and what looked like twenty or thirty chipmunks.

Over the past few days, I'd managed to add one of each to my repertoire of morphs, catching them and holding them down as I returned to my human body. Now, it was time to find a duplicate.

The red-tail fluffed my/its feathers, shifting its/our weight on the branch as it/we settled into a more comfortable position. Hunting was a long, uncertain process, almost entirely made up of watching and waiting. There were patterns in the movements of the creatures below, and the hawk brain needed to know which way its prey would dart before it made its move.

I still wasn't sure how I felt about using the hawk morph just to acquire other creatures. I had no problem with hunting—I wanted to be a zoologist if I couldn't be a vet—but I wasn't eating the animals, just holding them down so I could borrow their DNA. Somehow, that made it worse—three of them had been pretty badly hurt in the process, and one had died before I'd fully demorphed. I'd acquired it anyway, just to see, and was slightly disturbed when it worked just fine.

But the only other way to catch them was with traps, and while I thought I could build a snare, I had nothing to use as bait except the berries and crickets that were already available everywhere.

So hawk it was. I let my own consciousness recede, sinking deeper into the experience as the animal mind continued to observe. Part of the beauty of the autopilot was that I no longer had to be fully human for twenty-four hours a day—no longer had to think or plan or remember. It was easy, inside an animal's body, to dodge thoughts of my parents, or of Visser Three, or of Jake…

Long minutes passed. The sun crawled across the sky, occasionally dipping behind the clouds. At the other end of the meadow, the other hawk tried for a rabbit, failed, and flapped dispiritedly back up to its perch.

My own hawk brain had zeroed in on one of the chipmunks, an older, fatter male with one eye missing. It was jumpy and suspicious, always turning and turning, but there was something wrong with one of its legs. It was just a hair slower than all the rest, with a noticeable bias toward dodging to the left.

Silently, gracefully, we took to the air, moving in a tight spiral, once more allowing the thermals to lift ourselves higher and higher. Two hundred feet—five hundred—nearly a thousand feet up, and the chipmunk was still as clear in my sight as if it had been in arms' reach.

My human brain resurfaced just long enough to note that rollercoasters would never be the same, and then we were diving, the hawk body tight and streamlined as we arrowed toward the ground. Our target moved a couple of inches, oblivious, and the hawk adjusted effortlessly, changing course in the space of an instant. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice began to count—three—two—one—

At the last, the very last moment, the hawk spread our wings, dropping almost instantly from a hundred miles per hour to something like twenty or thirty. It raked our claws forward, our eyes still locked onto the chipmunk—

Success. Seizing control, I felt my talons dig into the dirt, the tiny mammal caught between them, pinned to the ground. I suppressed the urge to squeeze, the predator's killer instinct, and immediately began to demorph.

The other chipmunk I had pinned—two days earlier—had been the one to die. She'd been a female, her markings lighter, with fewer stripes around her face. She'd been younger, too, probably only a year old. I'd accidentally broken her spine in the dive.

I had used a couple of sticks to dig a shallow grave, unwilling to leave her lying in the field for other birds, even though I knew the foxes and the raccoons would dig her up as soon as night fell.

This one, though—it would live, as soon as I finished acquiring it and let it go. As my feathers melted and ran together, becoming skin, I reached down under my foot and gripped it, tightly. It struggled madly, scratching and squeaking until I finished demorphing and the acquiring hypnosis took hold.

Staying crouched in the dirt—I still wasn't comfortable being naked outdoors, even though I knew there was no one around for miles—I began to concentrate, holding the images of both chipmunks in my mind. A blend of the two of them would be sandy brown with six stripes, maybe three ounces and two years old, with white around its eyes…

I felt the changes begin. Fighting the urge to celebrate, I continued to focus—for all I knew, the morphing tech was simply defaulting to one chipmunk or the other. I would have to figure out some way to confirm the difference from the inside—if I ended up young and male, for instance, or old and female.

It took another minute for the morph to finish—and several long seconds to be certain—but in the end, I was convinced. My body was young, male, and thin, with markings on its paws that didn't match either of the animals I had originally acquired.

So, I thought to myself. I guess it's that easy.

Or at least, it was that easy to get one combination. I would have to play around a lot more to see if I could control the mixture of traits, or to find out whether it was possible to combine DNA from multiple species.

But still. Even if the process was automatic, and couldn't be adjusted, I'd just unlocked a whole new world of human disguises. I would be able to wear grown-up faces without putting real grown-ups at risk. That, coupled with the autopilot and my ability to control the morphing process—

It might not be enough. But it no longer felt like nothing.

I hadn't slept in six days.

I'd been continuing to push the boundaries of the morphing power, acquiring more and more animals for experimentation. I hadn't yet cracked cross-species morphing, but I had managed to change the fur pattern of a single, specific fox just by concentrating very hard, and been able to remorph it again without extra effort. I'd also finally figured out how to morph clothing—I couldn't morph into something with clothes, obviously, but I could morph my own clothes away, and they returned with the rest of my body when I came back.

Whenever I wasn't experimenting, I was exploring, learning the ins and outs of the landscape in a dozen different bodies. I had stopped wandering aimlessly and begun moving in a pattern, and I'd covered almost four hundred miles traveling practically nonstop, day and night.

At first, I'd thought I was just sort of manic—charged-up from the stress, from the constant circling of my thoughts as I swung back and forth between determination and despair. After a few days, I had turned not-thinking-about-it into an art form.

By the time the weekend rolled around, though, it was clear that there was something else going on. Not only had I not slept, I wasn't even tired. And it had been Thursday when I'd last had something to eat or drink.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew the answer. To test it, I flew back to the cave and demorphed back to human for an evening—the first time I'd spent more than a few minutes in my own body in over a week. Sure enough, after a few hours of huddling inside my sleeping bag, hunger and exhaustion began to set in.

Your true body remains unchanged—sent elsewhere, its processes suspended. That's what Elfangor had said, when he'd explained the morphing technology to us. He'd also said it was all a lie, whatever that meant.

But in six days, I'd spent only a couple of hours in my own body, and as far as I could tell, a couple of hours was all that my body had experienced. It hadn't gotten tired, hadn't gotten hungry, hadn't needed to pee—not until I stopped morphing.

I tried another test, hyperventilating until my blood was saturated with oxygen and then holding my breath and counting. With effort, I could manage a little over two minutes.

I did it again and began to morph, returning to the body of the osprey. It was a fishing bird, able to dive underwater, which meant that it, too, knew how to hold its breath. I made it all the way through the change before inhaling, and spent a few minutes scoping out the area in the predawn light before returning to the open patch of mulch and leaves outside the cave.

Taking in several quick, shallow avian breaths, I began to demorph.

As the change passed through my chest, I could feel my lungs returning, feel the tight, urgent pressure awaken in the back of my mind. I counted to forty-seven before I had to start breathing again, and I started by letting air out—far more than I could have held in the bird's tiny chest.

Okay. So the stasis thing is true.

That meant—

It meant—

What did it mean?

There were questions that Marco would ask, or angles that Jake or Rachel would see—clever tricks and surprising connections. I could probably see them if I thought it through carefully enough.

Okay. You can hold your breath. That means you might be able to demorph and remorph entirely underwater, with the right kind of preparation.

And I'd already discovered that I could go basically forever without sleep or food, as long as I could keep morphing. If I hurt myself, I could probably morph into some other body long enough to get to a hospital. And if I kept going the way that I had been, I'd start aging more slowly—I'd already lost almost a week by spending so much time in morph. And—

And—

My breath caught in my throat, a shiver running down my spine.

Wait—what—when I morph, what's—

I had a hard time finishing the thought.

When I morph, what's doing the thinking?

I swallowed painfully, my throat suddenly dry, feeling very glad that I was in my own body.

I had been a horse, a bird, a spider, a mouse. I'd been a lizard, a fly, even an alien. In each of those forms, I'd had thoughts—feelings—memories. I'd felt the rush of adrenaline, the burning sensation of fear and shame, the soaring tingle of euphoria—all the familiar flags of normal, human emotion.

I hadn't stopped to ask how that was possible, in bodies so different from my own. It had just felt so normal—so obvious. On some deep, unconscious level, I'd just assumed that my human body was out there somewhere, hooked up to the morph through some kind of real-time VR link.

But if my body's functions were paused so thoroughly that air wasn't even circulating through my lungs—

Then my synapses couldn't be firing. My nerves couldn't be sending signals. My neurotransmitters couldn't be ebbing and flowing.

Which meant that I couldn't be thinking.

Calm down, Cassie. It works, remember? You must have morphed almost a hundred times by now. No point in freaking out.

But what was going on?

Maybe I was just going crazy, out in the woods all by myself.

It was Sunday, almost a full week since I'd left the others. I was maybe twelve miles out from the cave, hunting bears in the new valley I'd discovered.

Not to eat, of course—after a night of raw berries and cold terror, I'd gone back to staying in morph pretty much all the time. It had occurred to me that I could use morphing to make infinite food, if I was willing to chop off my own leg—

—and it had occurred to me to be pretty disturbed about the fact that this thought had occurred to me at all—

—but I wasn't willing, and I'm pretty much a vegetarian anyway, so that was that.

No, I was looking for a rematch.

Closing my eyes, I finished my morph, and when I opened them again, my vision was razor sharp once again. This time, I'd gone with the peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on earth. Picking my way awkwardly through the pine needles, I found a nice, clear space and launched skyward.

It had all started by accident, while I was inside of a badger on autopilot. I had been daydreaming, paying too little attention, and had stumbled across another badger, this one just slightly larger than me.

I'd read that badgers were not particularly territorial, but I suppose some combination of the fact that this one was in the middle of dinner and that I had tumbled out of a bush practically right in its face was enough to set it off. It reared, hissing, and my own body responded, and before I knew what was happening, the pair of us were snapping and swiping and grappling as we rolled through the undergrowth.

Despite the other badger's size, I had human ingenuity on my side—I managed to shake it off by tossing dirt into its eyes and mouth and then using the sticks littering the forest floor as pikes. Disgruntled, it had retreated back into a thicket, leaving me to lick my wounds and demorph.

Except that I hadn't demorphed—not right away. I'd stayed in the badger body, feeling the twinge and ache of bruises, the delicious trickle of blood from my scratches—

—delicious?—

—the heavy, wet heat of adrenaline and exhaustion. The sudden battle had awakened something buried just beneath the surface, something decidedly "not Cassie" and yet very, very much me.

Maybe it was the stress. The fear, the doubt, the impotent helplessness.

Maybe it was the isolation. Seven days with only a few hours of sleep, without human contact of any kind.

Maybe it was the morphing. The raw, animalistic instinct.

Or maybe, just maybe, the mask was slipping a little. I'd always known I wasn't really a good person, deep down inside. It was why I tried so hard—why I put so much effort into my morals, my code, my way of living. I couldn't live the way Rachel did, always on the edge of fury. I needed more of a buffer.

But my buffer was wearing thin.

I still tried to justify it, inside my head—told myself that I didn't actually know enough about how most of my morphs would hold up in a fight, that I needed some real-life experience. I'd learned a bit about rhinos and elephants from my mom at the Gardens, and I knew a lot about wolf hunting behavior, but—

Where was a barn owl, in the pecking order?

Could a gorilla handle a grizzly?

How effective was a skunk's spray, really?

Were ferrets better at wrestling, or at running away?

I made a little list of questions, every one of them plausible, every one a cover for the real reason—that I'd dug my teeth into the other badger's shoulder, and I'd enjoyed it.

That might have scared me, if I'd let myself think about it.

I started picking fights, at first in situations where I knew I'd have the upper hand, but growing gradually bolder as I realized that starting to demorph would scare away almost any animal except a moose. Moose are crazy—I can't remember where I learned that, but I was pretty sure I didn't want to risk it.

I'd decided to start every battle on autopilot, to see what the animal brain would do, find out what each animal's natural style could teach me. I'd worked my way upward from skunks and raccoons to foxes and wolves, and was now tracking a huge, grumpy black bear who'd thoroughly outmatched my kangaroo morph.

I was going too far, I knew. I could feel myself going too far, could feel myself spiraling again, upward this time, losing control.

But what good was control?

Control wasn't going to save my parents.

Spotting the bear in the bushes below, I circled, marking its general direction, confirming as always that there were no humans nearby. Aiming for a clear space a few hundred yards ahead of it, I swooped, dropping down into the tall, dry grass.

The valley I had discovered was almost perfect as a hiding spot, a mile-long gash through the mountain with steep, rocky walls, narrow entryways, and trees growing out from either side, forming a kind of tunnel or trellis. Only in the very center was the gap wide enough for the sun to poke through, shining down on a medium-sized meadow with a creek running down its center. You wouldn't notice the valley at all unless you were directly above it, or unless you happened to spot the tiny, twisting pathways through the brambles at either end.

Between fights, I'd begun cutting down some of the trees inside, using the beaver morph to cut through the trunks and the elephant morph to move them, being careful not to thin out the canopy too much. I had an idea that I might be able to build an actual shelter, right next to the spring where the creek bubbled out from the rock.

But at the moment, I had more pressing matters to attend to. The bear had rolled down into the valley and was currently picking its way idly through the berry bushes—my berry bushes—at the edge of the clearing. In another few minutes, it would pass right by the hollow where I was quietly demorphing.

Rock, paper, scissors, bear.

I had yet to test out the tiger, the rhino, the gorilla, or the grizzly, as none of the opponents I'd come across rated quite that level of firepower. The best fights were the ones where the other animal was stronger than me—where ingenuity and nerve made the difference.

The gorilla.

I spared a brief regret for the fact that I didn't have any rope—I was still conscientious enough to avoid giving any of my opponents a concussion that might be lethal, but it would've been nice to acquire the bear—and took in a deep breath as the last of the feathers disappeared from my arms, leaving me fully human. The bear was only a hundred yards away, now, and I was about to refocus when another, more interesting possibility occurred to me.

It had been days since I'd morphed Elfangor—not since the morning after his brother fell silent, when I'd checked one last time to see if the voice had returned. I'd been sort of reluctant to return to it, after that—it was another reminder of just how alone I was, out here in the mountains.

But I'd made up my mind to return to the city tomorrow night anyway, and in the meantime, I was curious to see how the Andalite body would react to the autopilot trick. It was a strange mix of predator and prey, at least according to Earth archetypes—I wasn't sure whether it would be aggressive and confident, or stealthy and cautious.

Raising a hand to shade my eyes, I looked over toward the edge of the clearing, where the bear had changed direction slightly and was now pulling at a young sapling. If it stuck to its general pattern, I had at least another couple of minutes before it reached me.

Closing my eyes, I held the image of Elfangor in my mind and began the change.

Even though Andalites had fur and hooves, the process of morphing into one was very different from the process of morphing into an Earth mammal. It was mostly the extra eyes and the extra pair of limbs, I guess—more than anything, it reminded me of morphing into a cockroach or an ant.

This time, instead of bursting out of my chest or stomach, the extra legs emerged from the ones I already had, the flesh and bone pinching and splitting right down the middle, giving me a nauseating glimpse of my own marrow before filling out again with new muscle. I would have flinched, but I was used to things like that now—two days earlier, when morphing into a trout, my skin and tendons had melted away from my hands almost entirely before the bones themselves began to shrink.

I felt my jawbone begin to dissolve as my throat sealed shut, my digestive tract shifting and rearranging itself, reaching down into my legs. With an audible crack, my four knees reversed themselves, and I fell forward onto my arms, lifting myself back up as my fingers multiplied from ten to fourteen.

It wasn't so bad. Last week, I'd gotten more than halfway into fly morph while remaining entirely full-size. I'd had a proboscis that was three feet long.

My body began to rebalance as the long Andalite tail extruded itself from my spine, the blade growing out like a fingernail while the fur sprouted all along my back and sides. I felt a brief absence, a partial blindness as my brain switched over to four-eyed vision before the eyes themselves appeared, and then the stalks emerged from the back of my skull.

This time, the final change was in my nose and ears, the former flattening and splitting into an extra pair of elongated nostrils while the latter grew delicate, elfin points and slid backwards toward my "neck." I felt the Andalite sense of smell emerge—not as keen as a wolf's, but still better than a human's—and the morph was complete.

Rearing up into centaur stance, I checked on the bear. It was closer, still unaware of my presence as it dug at a gopher barrow. Swishing my tail back and forth, I concentrated, looking for the little mental catch that was the autopilot switch.

Click.

I almost didn't react quickly enough. Without the slightest hint of warning, my tail blade whipped forward, striking toward my own throat. I seized control with less than an inch to spare, the muscles quivering and spasming as the Andalite equivalent of adrenaline flooded my system.

‹YEERK!› bellowed a voice in my mind, loud and harsh and impossibly close. ‹GET OUT OF MY HEAD!›