"Bob Marley, mon," I said. "Help me out, mon."

Bob didn't help. Bob was singing "No Woman, No Cry." And that translated way too easily in my head into "No Mother, No Cry."

"Great," I muttered. "Let's just wallow in self-pity."

I was not feeling good. No one had called me a coward. Maybe no one had even noticed the way I'd bolted. But I had.

I could come up with great excuses for being so scared. I was the only one who'd ever been chewed almost in half by a shark. And that was a pretty good reason to feel afraid.

But nothing changed the fact that I had run away.

And that feeling was crowded in my head with a whole ton of emotions about seeing my mother.

It was a terrible thing when my mom died. Or at least seemed to die. But as awful as death is, at least there's an end involved. You know what has happened. It makes sense. An awful kind of sense, but sense.

You meet other people who have lost mothers or fathers. You turn on TV and see stories about people who have lost parents or brothers or sisters. You read it in books. In newspapers. The counselors at school have a category for you, and they tell you things that are supposed to help.

You hate it, but you belong to a group of people like yourself.

But what group is there for people whose mother isn't dead but is a slave to an alien presence in her head? What group do I belong to when I realize that what looks like my mother is actually someone who would kill me without hesitation?

I guess it's what Jake feels every time he sits down to dinner with Tom.

I guess he feels the same way I do. Only Jake and 1 don't talk about that kind of stuff. Jake's my best friend. But he's my best friend because I'm me, you know? Because I'm funny and smart and I'd back him up anytime, any place.

I mean, what am I supposed to do? I'm me, Marco, not some touchy-feely, share-your-feelings-with-the-group kind of person. I don't share feelings, I make people laugh.

I have a picture of my mom next to my bed. I look at it every night before I go to bed. I can never decide what I want to see when I look at it. I don't know if I see the mother I lost, or the mother I want to rescue somehow. I don't know anymore.

I construct little fantasies in my head. Of how I'll get her away from the Yeerks. And I'll keep her locked up for three days until the Yeerk in her head dies from lack of Kandrona rays. And she'll be my mom again.

"And then what, Marco?" I ask myself. The Yeerks won't take it lying down. You can't just starve Visser One to death and take her host body and live happily ever after. We'd be hunted. We'd be hunted for as long as there was a Yeerk left alive on planet Earth.

And if the Yeerks ever did catch up with my mom and dad and me, they'd know I was an Animorph. And then they'd figure it all out and the others would be done for. Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias, Ax ...

"I am way too young to have to deal with this kind of stuff," I yelled into my pillow. And then I pulled the pillow away from my face.

My dad was standing there, framed in the doorway of my room. He mouthed the words "I knocked." And he did a little pantomime of having knocked.

I yanked the headphones off. "Oh, hi. Urn, hi."

"Sorry. I just came to see if you wanted to watch the game with me."

"Oh, yeah. The game," I said. "Urn, I guess not. I have homework and stuff."

"Oh. Okay." He started to leave. Then he turned back and said, "You know, Marco, you can always talk to me."

"Oh. Sure, Dad."

"I mean, if there's anything going on that's bothering you."

It was a nice offer. My dad's a nice man. I'd like to grow up to be as good a man as my father. But you know what? Right then, dark suspicion was seeping into my mind. Why was he interested? What did he suspect?

Was my father one of them, too?

"Nothing's bothering me, Dad. I was just . . . urn, you know, singing along with the music. It was a song lyric."

"Ah. Okay. Well, I'll call up to you when the pizza gets here."

He left, shutting the door behind him.

"Nice world you live in, Marco," I said softly. I could trust my father and maybe end up dead. I could try to help my mother and maybe end up dead. And as a bonus I could get all my friends killed and doom the entire human race.

I looked at the book I was supposed to read. "That ain't happening. Not tonight."

And I thought about my father, sitting down in the living room and turning on the game. Who knew if he was my father any more than my mother was really my mother?

I couldn't really trust him. I couldn't go downstairs and spill all my problems out for him.

But you know what? I could sure go sit with the man and watch the game.

I could do that.

Those were not normal sharks," Cassie pointed out. "Somehow they were being directed. Controlled. They worked like a pack. Sharks don't cooperate."

We had met up in the woods beyond Cassie's farm.

"Are they Controllers? I mean, we discovered horses being made into Controllers," Rachel pointed out.

"No," Ax said. "Cassie has shown me pictures of the internal structure of a shark. There is no room in that brain for a Yeerk. The structures would never support a Yeerk."

"Could be implants," I suggested. "You know, electrodes or something."

Everyone just kind of shrugged at that. Who knew? All we knew was that we'd almost been slaughtered by a bunch of very unusual sharks.

"They were guarding that facility, that's clear," Tobias said.

"All the more reason for us to go in," I said.

Jake kind of raised his eyebrow at me. Rachel nodded agreement. I knew what Jake was thinking. He was thinking I had my own reasons. Reasons only he and I knew about.

I shook my head slightly, telling him no. No, I was not going to tell the others. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

He shrugged and let it go. But I could see he wasn't happy about it.

"I agree we have to go back there," Jake said. "These Leerans Erek talked about. We cannot have some psychic Controllers running around."