Tobias went into a lazy upward spiral, hanging back. Rachel and Cassie split off, too. The Yeerks would have heavy security around the meeting of The Sharing. The Yeerks know all about morph-+. They would be on alert.

Ax, in a harrier morph, Jake, in his peregrine falcon morph, and I flew on toward the lake, though still far apart.

"You know, one of your kind tried to kill me the other day." I said to Jake.

"Tobias told me."

Jake said. "Gotta watch out.

Falcons rule."

"Yeah, well I noticed he didn't try it a second time."

"Don't diss falcons."

Jake said.

"0ne-on-one in a fair fight, an osprey would kick your butt."

"As if." Jake sneered.

"Excuse me." Ax interrupted. "ls there some special meaning to this conversation that I don't understand?"

"Yeah." I said. "The meaning is that Jake and I are scared, so we're babbling in a desperate effort not to think about it."

"Ah. I am frightened, too. I don't really like morphing tiny animals. I keep thinking about all the rest of my mass."

"Your what?" I asked, not really caring. I was focused on the morphing ahead.

"My mass. When you morph something smaller than yourself, your body mass must go somewhere.

So it goes into Zero-space. Zero-space is the space that ships travel through when they are going faster than light. It's not very likely to happen, but sometimes a ship traveling in Z-space will intersect with a temporarily parked mass."

This got my total, complete attention.

"Wait a minute. Are you telling me that when we get small, all the leftover . . .

stuff ... all the extra flesh and guts and bones go bulging into Zero-space like some big balloon of human tis-sue?"

"0f course. Where did you think all the mass went?"

I shuddered. "I really didn't think about it."

Jake was no more thrilled than I was. "So right now there's a big bag of Jake floating in Zero-space? And it's possible some spaceship will zoom along and hit it and splatter it all over?"

"No, no, of course n."

Ax said.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Too soon, it turned out.

"0f course no ship would actually hit a floating mass." Ax said, talking to us like we were nitwits. "The ship's shielding systems would disintegrate the mass. That's what troubles me about doing small morphs. It very seldom happens. The odds are millions to one.

But it could happen."

Jake and I thought about this for a while. About a spaceship "disintegrating" some big wad of our mass. It was not a pretty picture.

"Hey, Ax?" Jake said.

"You know how we wanted you to be honest with us? To tell us everything you know?"

"Yes, Prince Jake."

"Small change. In the future, don't tell us things that will scare us silly just as we're going into possible battle."

"A big wad of Marco in Zero-space." I muttered. "Like hanging your butt out of a car window, waiting for a truck to come along and sideswipe it off."

Just at that moment, I topped the crest of the ridge.

Tall pines nearly scraped my belly. And there, spread out before me, sparkling in the sun, was a large lake nestled between the surrounding hills and mountains.

"0kay, boys." Jake said. "This is where I peel off. Just one final word. I know spiders eat bugs, so do not, I repeat, do not, eat any flies. I'll have enough to worry about in fly morph."

"Remind me again."

I said. "Why are we doing this instead of staying home and sleeping in late?"

"We're saving the world."

Jake said.

"0h, yeah. Great. My mass is hanging out in the Zero-space highway and I'm about to become Spiderman. I knew there had to be a pretty good reason."

here were probably two hundred people around the lake below us -- boys, girls, older people. Some were swimming.

Some were water-skiing. Some were grilling burgers and hot dogs over charcoal fires. A lot were just milling around and talking and laughing.

You'd swear it was some kind of big community picnic. From the air they all looked so normal.

And probably most of the people below us were normal. But a lot of them were Controllers. And one of them was Erek, who was certainly not normal.

We stayed well back from the lakeshore and dropped down into the trees. We came to rest on the ground, inside a cluster of tall bushes.

My osprey vision and osprey hearing had revealed no one within a hundred yards. But I was tingling with nervousness, just the same.

"Shall we demorph?" Ax asked.

"Not yet. Tobias said he would swing back over, once we were on the ground."

So we waited there, looking a bit weird, two birds of prey just hanging out inside a bunch of bushes at the edge of the forest. I could hear the whine of power boats out on the water, and closer, little snatches of human laughter.

"0kay, guys."

Tobias's thought-speak voice suddenly spoke in my head. "Looks clear to me. You've got a guy and a girl maybe a hundred yards off. But I think they're making out, so they should be busy for a while."

I quickly began to demorph. One of the limitations on morphing is that you can't just morph straight from one form to another. You always have to return to your own body in between.

In Ax's case this meant returning to his An-dalite form. That had to make him nervous. There were dozens of Controllers just a few hundred feet away. Yeerks might overlook one kid sneaking around. They wouldn't overlook an An-dalite.

"Are you ready to morph again?" Ax asked me, once we were back in our normal bodies.

"I'll neverbe ready to morph a spider," I said. My teeth were chattering, and it wasn't cold.

"I have to morph." Ax said.

"I can't stay here in Andalite form."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. Okay.

Okay, I'm going to do this. But I'm going to keep my eyes closed."

I focused my mind on the spider. But I lost concentration, mostly because even the image of that wolf spider grossed me out. Then Ax started to change.

I knew still couldn't just stand there and watch. I knew I had to morph.

"It can't be any worse than morphing a fly, right? Or an ant?" I asked no one. Not that I wanted to think about the ant morph. We'd had a very, very, very bad time in ant morph.

I closed my eyes and focused again. This time I kept my concentration.

I felt myself starting to shrink. Shrinking is always a little weird, but now I was also thinking about some big, disgusting balloon of Marco mass suddenly bulging out into Zero-space.

Whatever Zero-space was.

I could feel myself getting smaller. I could feel very strange things happening inside me: sudden feelings of emptiness where organs were simply disappearing.

And there was a distracting squishy sound that came up my spine and through my skull.

The sound of bones turning to marrow, and of marrow sort of oozing away.

I wouldn't be needing any bones, I guess.

I kept my eyes tightly shut, not wanting to see what was happening. And I held on to my fears with a death grip of determination. I mean, if there's anything worse than being a spider, it's being some disgusting mix of half human, half spider.

But then . . .

POP! POP! POP! I could see! I tried to close my eyes, but no! I didn't have eyelids. It's very hard to close your eyes when you don't have eyelids.

Eyes were popping open in my forehead.

Eyes were erupting out of my head like zits.