"Okay, take off," the policeman said at last. "But I have my eye on you. Get back with the others."

Cassie turned and headed away as fast as she could walk. I caught up with her. I guess seeing a dog come bounding out of nowhere startled her, because she jumped.

"Oh, it's you," she said.

"Yeah. That was close. What were you doing there?"

She shrugged. "Just wanted to make sure you were okay."

"I was safer than you were," I pointed out.

We got back to the spot where Rachel, Marco, and Tobias were waiting. I didn't even want to morph back into my human body. I knew that I could just let myself go again, and in a few minutes my dog brain would forget why my human brain was sad. If someone would just throw a stick out into the surf I could go after it. The water would make me happy. The chasing would make me happy.

Now I knew why Tobias was so reluctant to leave his hawk's body. Being an animal could be a nice way to escape from all your troubles.

I began to morph back into my own body. Cassie and Rachel turned and looked out toward the water.

When I was completely myself again, I said, "Marco, you were right. Tom is a Controller,"

Marco did not look pleased about being right.

I told them what Tom had said to Chapman about bringing me to the meeting to either use me or kill me.

"Wait a minute. Chapman is one of them, too?" Rachel asked. "Our Chapman? Mr. Chapman the assistant principal?"

"I think he's some kind of a leader," I said. "It was him the other night at the construction site.

He was the one who told the Hork-Bajir just to keep the head."

"That is so Chapman," Marco said.

"I suggest we get the heck out of here," Tobias said.

57 "No, it's okay," I said. "Chapman told Tom there was not to be any killing at a Sharing meeting. They don't want any suspicious activities. He also said they couldn't just go around killing every kid who might have been at the construction site. They needed to be sure."

"That's decent of them," Rachel said dryly.

"Not really. Chapman just said that for a while longer they still have to avoid attracting too much attention. A bunch of kids start turning up dead and people will definitely notice. He said they should just wait — kids can't keep quiet for long about seeing aliens. When the kids talk, the Controllers will find them and get rid of them."

"Except that we aren't going to talk about what we saw," Rachel said.

"You got that right," Marco agreed. "We aren't saying anything. We are forgetting everything we saw. We are getting on with our normal lives."

"And leave Tom the way he is?" I demanded. "No way. Never. He's my brother. I'm going to save him."

"Just how do you figure you'll do that?" Marco asked sarcastically. "Let's see, it's you versus Chapman, the cops, a bunch of Hork-Bajir and Taxxons, and, worst of all, that creep, Visser Three. All you can do to fight them is turn into a dog and bite their ankles. It's like being stuck in the most impossible video game ever invented."

I grinned. Or at least I showed my teeth. "Yeah, it is, kind of. But I'm pretty good at video games."

"And he won't be alone," Rachel said. "I'm in this, too."

"And me," Tobias said.

"Me, too," Cassie agreed.

"Swell," Marco said. "So suddenly you're the Fantastic Four. This isn't a comic book. This is real."

We heard the sound of people coming through the dunes. The meeting of the full members had broken up.

"Everyone, quiet," I said. "We'll let this ride . . . for now."

I said that to calm Marco down. I had no intention of letting it ride.

I pulled Cassie aside. "Listen, Cassie, I need an animal morph that will let me watch Chapman without him seeing me. What do you have at the farm?"

Cassie got quiet for a moment. "Let me think. We have a lot of injured birds, of course. We have the wolf with the broken leg. We have the wildcat with one eye."

I waited while she went down a list of all the animals in the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic.

58 Suddenly Cassie snapped her fingers. "I wonder. . . . How small an animal do you think we can morph?"

I shrugged. I had no idea.

"I may have something in mind," she said. "It's not really in the clinic as a patient. It just sort of lives there. It's small. It can crawl up walls. It's fast, if you need to get away. And I guess it can hear and see okay."

Which is how I ended up in Cassie's barn later that night, crawling beneath cages full of sick buzzards and between a pair of jumpy deer, looking for lizards.

59 CHAPTER 16

I did it Monday morning in my locker at school. I turned into a lizard.

A green anole, to be exact. It's a member of the iguana family. Like you care.

I waited till the bell rang for first period, which was English class. When everyone else was out of the hallway, I just climbed into my locker. I tried to act cool about it, just in case anyone was watching.

The locker was about two inches shorter than me, so I had to crouch. And it was so tight I couldn't move. The only light was from the three small ventilation slits. I could hear my heart pounding in the cramped, dark space. I was afraid.

It was one thing to turn into a dog. I mean, it's weird, it's strange, but it's also kind of cool.

Dogs are cool animals. But lizards?

"I should have practiced," I muttered under my breath. "I really should have practiced like Cassie said."

I started to focus for the morphing. I remembered the way we had caught the lizard the night before last. We'd spotted it with a flashlight, and Cassie had put a bucket over it so it couldn't get away.

It had been fairly creepy, just touching it to acquire its DNA pattern. Now I was going to de-come it.

The first thing I noticed was that I suddenly had more room inside the locker. I didn't have to crouch down. And my shoulders weren't scrunched up anymore.

I touched my face with one hand. My skin was looser than it should have been. And pebbly to the touch.

I ran my hand over my head. My hair was almost all gone.

Things began to happen very fast. The locker grew and grew around me. It was big as a barn.

Big as a stadium!

It was like falling. Like falling off a skyscraper and taking forever to hit the ground.

I was standing on something sticky, as large as a boulder. How had a boulder gotten into my locker? But then I realized — it was a wad of gum! An old, chewed wad of gum stuck to the bottom of my locker.

Gigantic drapes as big as the sails of a ship were falling all around me. They were my clothes. In the dim light I could see two monstrous, misshapen things on either side of me. I could just make out the Nike swoosh, and realized they were my shoes. They were the size of houses.

And then the lizard brain kicked in.

Fear! Trapped! Run! Run! Rruunrunrun!

60 I shot left. A wall! I scampered up, feeling my feet stick to it. Trapped! I jumped back.

Another hard surface. Trapped! Runrunrunrun!

I fought to get control, but the lizard brain was panicked. It didn't know where it was. It wanted out. OUT!

Go toward the light! I ordered my new body. The ventilation slits. That was the way out.

But the body was afraid of the light. It was terrified.

I was still bouncing off the walls. I could not overcome the panic instincts of the lizard body.

Go to the light! I screamed inside my head. And suddenly I was there. I poked my head out, and my body slithered after me. My tongue flicked out and I got a weird kind of input from it.