Then, rippling across my body, the patterns became three-dimensional.

The patterns seemed to swell up and become full-fledged feathers.

It itched. But it did not hurt. I resisted the urge to scratch. Because already my fingers were not exactly fingers anymore. The finger bones had begun to elongate. At the same time my arm bones contorted and shrank, becoming lighter, air-filled, hollow.

Bones make a sort of grinding sound when they morph. It's disturbing the first few times you do it. To put it mildly.

Finally, I began shrinking. The ground began to rush up toward me. Even though I've done this many times, I still can't quite shake the feeling that I'm falling and falling and falling without ever quite hitting bottom.

I had left my boots standing right near me. They're rubber boots that come up to about mid-calf. But now, as I shrank, the boots grew. From midcalf height to waist height in less than a minute.

And I was still shrinking.

At the same time my internal organs began to shift and rearrange. My long, twisted human intestines became the much shorter digestive tract of a bird. My slow, plodding human heart became the rapid-fire heart of an osprey. Kidneys, lungs, liver. . . nothing stayed the same.

Then . . . SPRROOOT! My lips bulged out and out and very suddenly became harder than fingernails. I had a curved, ripping hawk's beak.

I felt my teeth sort of shrivel way. I felt my forehead recede and my chest narrow. All the fat on my body disappeared, leaving me little more than skin and and muscle and hollow bones wrapped in feathers.

I noticed several of the animals in the cages watching us with great intensity. None more intense than an injured fox who seemed mesmer- ized by the way we had gone from being huge, threatening humans to small, tasty birds. He watched me with hungry, glittering eyes.

"Better get a move on," Tobias said. "We should be well clear before Cassie's dad gets here."

"Yeah," Marco said. "We look like we're here to break into the cages and bust the other birds outta here."

I spread my arms. But instead of arms I had wings. "l'm ready. Rachel?" I looked at Rachel. Her human eyes were just changing color. She stared back at me with an eagle's intense gaze. "Ready."

"Let's fly," I said. I opened my wings and beat them downward, hard.

And again. And again. I drew my talons up and beat several times more.

I rose from the floor of the barn. It was a struggle. We were inside, in a cramped area with no headwind.

I beat my wings and rose to the loft to perch beside Tobias. Rachel came to rest just across from us. She was nearly twice our size, with wings that stretched six feet from tip to tip and a blazingly white head and tail.

I looked out through the open hayloft. I looked with osprey eyes. It's as if humans are blind. I saw my dad's truck coming down the dirt road to our farm. I saw through the windshield. I saw his face. I saw the individual hairs on his head. If a fly had landed on his nose right then, I'd have been able to see its antennae twitch.

My dad was still two hundred yards away.

Then I lifted my gaze toward the rectangle of blue and white sky.

I opened my wings, launched myself forward, swooped out through the window, caught just enough of a breeze, and soared toward the clouds.

There are times when being an Animorph is pretty bad. But definitely not when you're flying.

Chapter 7

There is a lot to know about flying. Fortunately, the osprey's brain took care of most of that. It trimmed my tail. It adjusted the angle of my wings.

But my brain was there, too. And I flew.

We flapped hard to get some altitude and rise above the barn and my house. In a few seconds we were high enough for me to spot the orange Frisbee I'd accidentally thrown onto the roof of my house. We circled, fighting gravity, and I could see my dad pulling his truck up to the mailbox to check for letters.

Higher still, and I could see through my own living room window and see my mom tilting her head back, eyes closed, relaxing after a day at work.

"This way," Tobias called to us, and Rachel and I followed. The sky is home to Tobias. He knows his way around. Rachel and I are just visitors to the clouds.

"See over there? Off to the east?" Tobias asked. "See the way the clouds are piled up? The slight rippling in the air?"

I looked with my incredible osprey vision. And I did see the air ripple from heat. The same way you sometimes see heat waves rising from the pavement on a hot day. But these heat waves were half a mile away.

"Yes," I replied. "l see them. Is it a ther-mal?"

"A serious thermal. We'll ride that a mile straight up!"

After all this time, Tobias is still excited by flying. I guess I would be, too.

It is the coolest thing in the world.

We flew hard, separated by a few hundred yards so we wouldn't look like we were together. See, red-tails, bald eagles, and ospreys don't exactly fly in formation together.

I felt my wing muscles grow tired. Flapping is hard work. But when we reached the thermal it would be easier. A thermal is a pillar of rising warm air. You spread your wings in a thermal, and you can soar with very little energy.

Then, wonderfully, we were in it. I felt warm air billow up beneath my outstretched wings. And up I soared. Up and up and up!

"Hah-hah! Oh, man I love this!" Rachel yelled. "l love this, I love this, I love this! Yeeeee-haaah!"

"So, you're saying you love this?" Marco asked her.

Up we went, circling over and under and around each other. We were doing an airborne ballet of incredible gracefulness.

The ground fell away beneath us. Now even our excellent predators' hearing picked up no sound from the cars and houses and stores below us.

Up we went, till the tallest trees looked like tiny bushes. Till lawns became postage stamps. Till roads became shimmering streams of hot concrete.

And yet, even though everything below us became small, I could still see in startling detail. Especially anything that moved like prey: cats, dogs, mice, other birds.

"Look," Tobias said. "A flight of geese!"

I saw them up above us. They were going the same direction as us, but moving in a tight V-formation.

"Let's go catch them!" I cried.

Tobias laughed. "Yeah, right. See the way they fly? They never stop flapping. They're like machines. They can fly hundreds of miles. You ever watch a dog try to catch a passing car? That's what it would be like, us trying to catch those geese."

He was right. The geese just kept power-flying. Soon they were way past us.

"How long till we get to the Dry Lands?" Rachel asked.

"Long time," Tobias said. "But we're getting some great altitude. That will help."

"This will be so cool," Marco said. "Zone Ninety-one! We will penetrate the very heart of the government conspiracy to cover up alien visitors !"

"Marco, just how dumb are you?" Rachel asked. "We know about the realaliens. We know they don't look like E.T. or the guys you always see on alien books. And we know the real aliens, the Yeerks, don't go around kidnapping backwoods goobers and doing medical experiments on them."

"Maybe there are two different bunches of aliens," Marco said. "Maybe there are these aliens who crash-landed back in the fifties. Plus the Yeerks more recently."

"Yeah, right, Agent Mulder," Rachel grumbled. "Earth is the crossroads of every passing alien. We're the McDonald's next to the highway of the galaxy."