We talked for a while as we made rounds together. But my heart wasn't in it. I was thinking about some baby skunks somewhere, mewing and crying for their mother. And I was thinking I wished my dad wasn't so quick to let me go to Rachel's. Because, of course, we weren't really having a sleepover. Rachel was going to tell her mom she was spending the night at my house. And Jake would tell his parents a lie, and Marco would tell his father a lie, and we'd all be going into a situation that none of us wanted to be in.

I was going to face death, that very night. And the last thing I would have said to my father was a lie.

I remembered the tunnels of the ants.

I remembered them the way I saw them in my nightmares. I never had seen them in reality.

Ants don't see very well, and there's no light underground.

But in my dreams I saw everything. I saw the huge, metallic-looking heads of the enemy ants as they crashed through sand walls and locked their massive pincers on me and tried to slice me into pieces.

Do you know what it's like to think that you're going to die, and never even get back to human form? To believe that you're going to die as an ant, trapped in a hell that no human had ever been to?

And now I also saw those little skunk kits. Starving. Crying out, and with each cry, signaling to some predator.

"Sweetheart, are you okay?"

37 I realized my dad was staring at me. I had been breathing hard, almost crying. There were beads of sweat on my forehead.

"Yeah. Fine. Fine," I said quietly.

He finished his rounds and left.

I stayed behind. I went back to the skunk in her cage.

I opened the cage door and put my hand in. I was not wearing a glove.

See, you can't acquire DNA if you're wearing gloves.

38 Chapter TEN

Well, what a surprise seeing you all here," Marco said in a low whisper.

"Everyone still up for this?" Jake asked.

"Sure," Marco answered. "We're looking forward to it. Who needs sleep when you can run off on a suicide mission instead?"

It was pitch-black. It was three in the morning. We were at the edge of the forest. Jake, Rachel, Marco, and me. Tobias was in the tree above us.

The same five kids who had wandered stupidly through a construction site at night on our way home from the mall. The same kids who had seen the Andalite fighter land. The same five kids whose lives had been changed forever. We had been made into soldiers that night.

Soldiers in a terrible war we could not really hope to win.

Tobias had paid a terrible price. But so had the rest of us. There we were, in the dark, ready to do things that would make us scream if we ever stopped to think about them for too long.

Ax was there, too. Poor Ax, who was even more alone than the rest of us. He was in his own body, his stalk eyes restlessly peering in every direction.

"I thought we'd morph owls," Jake suggested. "They're fast, and they fly well at night. Till we get close."

I was relieved. Owl was a good choice for what 1 had in mind. Owls are the only natural predators of adult skunks. See, some species of owls don't have a sense of smell. If you're going to eat skunks, that's a good thing.

I wasn't going to eat adult skunks, of course. I was going to try to find some skunk babies.

"Wish I could go with you guys," Tobias said. "But I'm not much use at night. "

"You found us the way to get into this place," Jake said. "And you got us the termite to morph."

"And we're just so amazingly grateful," Marcosaid sarcastically.

We all laughed nervously. It was good to know that the others were all as scared as I was.

We all started to remove our outer clothing. We wore our morphing suits underneath -- a collection of bike shorts, leotards, and T-shirts. We can morph skintight clothing, but not things like sweaters or shoes or watches.

Jake wore a pair of bike shorts and a sort of spandex top. Marco snickered.

"What?" Jake demanded.

Marco put on an innocent face. "Nothing. Nothing. I'm just saying if we're going to be 39 superheroes we need to do something about these stupid outfits. We look like refugees from a Bulgarian gymnastics competition. That's all I'm saying."

"Except for Rachel, of course," I pointed out. Naturally, Rachel had found a way to coordinate her outfit. She looked great.

"Here's the plan," Jake said. "We morph owls to get close. We demorph at least two hundred yards away from the compound. Then we crawl close, morph termites, dig under the force field, and enter the termite holes in the outside of the building."

"As long as it's nice and simple," Rachel said darkly. She looked at me, and I realized that even fearless Rachel was afraid. That scared me.

I tried to focus entirely on assuming the owlmorph. But my brain was buzzing away. You know how sometimes you can't stop your brain from just racing around? It's like a computer that's playing a dozen programs at once.

I was worrying about too many things: my science project, lying to my parents, whether Ax really tried drinking engine oil, whether the baby skunks had already been killed. Maybe it was self-defense. I didn't want to start worrying about the thing that really worried me.

Somehow my life had turned very, very weird.

I saw Ax was morphing quickly. His tail went limp, like an empty sock. Feathers were growing to replace his fur.

I looked down at my own arm and saw the feather patterns being drawn on my skin. They were beautiful, really, if you didn't stop to think about them being on you. You could see the quill, a gently curved shaft. From it the thousands of individual vanes spread.

Then, quite suddenly, the feather-drawing became three-dimensional. They seemed to simply pop out of my skin. It itched a little as the feathers grew out, all across my body.

I was shrinking all the while. Getting smaller and smaller. The dirt and pine needles and leaves and twigs all came rushing up at me.

My bare feet grew rough, as if they were one big callous. Toes melted together, then formed into talons. Long, curved, sharp, tearing claws grew.

The talons were the main killing weapon of the great horned owl. An owl would fly along, silent in the night. Then it would strike, grabbing the prey -- a rabbit, a squirrel, a rat, a skunk -- by the head. . . .

The bones all through my body were rearranging themselves. Many disappeared altogether.

Others became twisted and misshapen. My breast bone grew deeper. My various finger bones grew longer first, then shorter. All of this made a grinding noise that resonated up through my body.

My internal organs were radically redesigned. And my eyes seemed to swell and swell till they filled my entire head. My eyes were so huge compared to my body that they practically rubbed together inside my skull.

40 Suddenly, it was no longer night. It was as bright as day.

The amount of light that was a dim, flickering candle to my human eyes was a spotlight to my owl's eyes.

"Whoa!" I heard Rachel cry.

"I enjoy these eyes very much," Ax commented. "They are wonderful." I spread my arms wide and opened my wings. The change was complete. I felt the cold edge of the owl's instincts. The instincts of a predator.

I had morphed the owl before, so I knew what to expect. I had used the eyes and the wings and felt the brain. It wasn't exactly second nature, but at least it wasn't a surprise.

"Ready?" Jake asked.

I flapped my wings and drew up my feet and rose easily into the tree branches that, in the darkness, were invisible to humans, but clear as blazing neon to me.