I saw a twenty-something woman in a waitress uniform coming toward us.

She was carrying a large wire cage.

"Squuuuaaaakkk! Pot stickers! Pot stickers! Squuuaaaakkkk!"

"Okay, we're straight on this? Rachel, Marco, Cassie, and me, follow her to the back. Tobias and Ax, you stay here as backup."

"Backup," Ax agreed. "Ba-kup. Bakkup. Look! Is that the place where cinnamon buns are created? Oh, cinnamon buns. Bunzuh."

Jake sighed. "Maybe after we're done we could go to Cinnabon," he said in his talking-to-lunatics voice.

See, in his own body, Ax has no mouth. Andalites talk by thought-speech and eat through their hooves. So when he's human, the Ax-man can get a little weird about spoken sounds. And a lot weird about flavor. And utterly insane when exposed to cinnamon buns, which, as far as Ax is concerned, are the finest things the human race has ever created. Forget music and art. Ax would trade a Cinnabon for the Mona Lisa, straight across.

"Okay, she's going!" Cassie warned.

The woman had stuffed the four parrots into the cage and was heading back into the restaurant. We followed her.

"Duh duh, duh duh, duh duh, duh duh, duh duh," I sang, doing the theme from Mission: Impossible. "Your mission, should you decide to accept it: Give the parrots back their dignity and strike a blow for Mommy Earth!"

Cassie rolled her eyes at me. Jake hid a smile.

"I can't believe you're going along with this, Jake. Responsible Jake giving his okay to a totally personal use of our powers. Never thought I'd see the day," I teased him. "It's 'cause he really likes Cassie," I added to Rachel in a stage whisper.

"It's because I know that if I didn't say yes, Cassie would do it anyway, and she'd get Rachel to go along, and possibly you, and the three of you need someone . . . someone sensible along."

"Yes, Dad," I mocked.

Jake made this deep-in-the-throat grinding

noise he makes sometimes. But I just laughed. Jake's been my best friend forever. He may be leader of the Animorphs, but that doesn't mean I have to take him too seriously.

We followed the woman and the parrots up to the point when she walked through a doorway into a storage room. We waited till she came back out and headed up to clean the parrot perch. Then into the storage room we went.

"Dee dee dee, dee dee dee, dee dee dee, da dum!" I hummed.

"Have I mentioned shut up, Marco?" Rachel asked me in a conversational tone.

"Okay, come on, you guys," Cassie urged.

We went to the parrot cage. Cassie removed the birds one by one, placing them into our hands. The birds remained very quiet as we acquired them.

That's what we call it when we absorb the DNA of an animal: acquiring.

It always puts the animal in a kind of trance. The parrots were no different.

We hid the parrots in a well-ventilated cupboard. Cassie assured us it was safe. And now all that was left to do was to become the parrots. To morph the parrots.

So that's what we did.

Most people would think morphing into an animal is fun. And I guess it is. But what it is, more than fun, is terrifying. And bizarre. And extreme.

Until you've done it, it's impossible to really understand how extreme it is.

The body you've had since you were born, the body with two arms and two legs and a head with your own personal face stuck on the front, changes.

It changes completely. Until nothing is left of you but your mind. You don't have your fingers to wiggle, or your legs to stand on, or your mouth to talk with. You look at the world through another animal's eyes.

As I focused my mind on the parrot, I felt the

changes begin. The first thing that happened was that my skin turned green.

Not that tinge of green you might get when you're sick or something. I'm talking GREEN. Brilliant, glowing, lustrous green. The green of the parrot's feathers.

"Whoa! Cool!" I said.

And it was cool, because at that same moment, the others were changing colors, too. Jake was turning as white as snow. Dead white. Rachel was a fascinating mix of yellow and orange. And Cassie . . .well, Cassie has a sort of unconscious talent for morphing. On her, deep crimson, red the color of blood, spread down from her shoulders, down and down her arms, down to her fingertips. Then the color rose up her neck, to change her face like it was a glass pitcher being slowly filled with cherry Kool-Aid. The very last things to change were the whites of her eyes.

For a brief second they shone white, then, like all the rest of her, they turned red.

Once my entire body was brilliant green, I began to shrink. The dirty floor of the storeroom rose up to meet me. It was like I was falling.

Like I'd passed out and was dropping facefirst toward the floor.

And as I shrank, my feet became bird feet. My thick, solid human bones became hollow bird bones. My internal organs, my lungs and stomach and liver, all twisted around in ways that should have made me scream in agony - except for the fact that morphing technology deadens pain.

My green skin became even brighter as I became smaller. Feather patterns drew themselves across my skin. My fingers sprouted outward and thinned to become feathers.

And then my face simply exploded outward. My entire face. Just, SPROOT!

My teeth, my lips, my nose, my chin, all bulged out like they were made of Silly Putty and someone was sticking their fist through from behind.

My skin - the skin that had been my cheeks and lips - turned hard. Hard as old fingernails. My huge, ridiculously large parrot beak was forming.

It was the color of old-man fingernails.

I looked out at my friends through sharply focused eyes. Not quite hawk eyes, but better than human vision.

"Well, aren't we colorful?" I said in thought-speak. Thought-speak is the telepathy we have when we're in morph.

"Better get into the cage quick, before that woman comes back," Cassie urged.

And right about then, I felt the parrot brain bubble up within my own human mind. It was weird. I've dealt with animal brains that were nothing but fear, like a mouse brain, and animal

brains that were all about killing, like a wolf spider's brain. I've even had to deal with the ma-chinelike, soulless brain of the ant. But it is rare to actually feel something like intelligence in that animal brain.