Animorphs In the time of Dinosuars K.A Applegate AN APPLE PAPERBACK SCHOLASTIC INC. New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney i For Michael and Jake Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012. ISBN 0-590-95615-9 Copyright ©1998 by Katherine Applegate. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. ANIMORPHS, APPLE PAPERBACKS and logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 189/90123/0Printed in the U.S.A. 40First Scholastic printing, June 1998 1 M a r c o My name is Marco. And I'm the idiot who happened to be watching the news on TV, and happened to see the story about the nuclear submarine that went down. Do you ever wish you could just learn to keep your mouth shut? I do. At least in this case I did. Because if I'd just kept my mouth shut, I wouldn't have ended up trying to suck air through my blowhole in the middle of a raging storm that kept dropping thirty-foot waves on my head. But maybe I should back up. Maybe I should explain why I had a blowhole in the first place. I'll make this quick: Things are happening here on good old planet Earth. Things most people would never dream of. Things that if you 2 told people they'd say, "Yeah, right. Want to try on this straitjacket?" We are being invaded. Not by spaceships from outer space firing ray guns. I mean, yes, from spaceships, but mostly the Yeerks don't use a lot of ray guns. The Yeerks are a parasitic species. Like tapeworms or lice or certain gym coaches who think you can't play basketball just because you are somewhat not tall. But Yeerks don't crawl on top of your head like lice. They crawl inside your head. A slug like a big snail slithers into your ear, oozes into your brain, flattens itself out, sinks into all the cracks in your brain, and from that point on, controls you. It can even force you to listen to Kenny G. Actually, it's not funny. I tend to make jokes, especially about things that bother me. And the Yeerks bother me. One of those people who has been enslaved by the Yeerks is my mother. We thought she was dead. She's not. At least I think she's not. When I last saw her she was still alive. Trying to destroy me and my friends, as a matter of fact. Which is a lot worse than just being grounded. Anyway, there are the Yeerks, this parasitic species that rampages throughout the galaxy looking for new host bodies. They control the Gedds, a species from their home planet. They 3 control the Hork-Bajir and the Taxxons. And their target now is Earth and humans. What does this have to do with me having a blowhole? Well, there's another species in on this with us. The Andalites. The Andalites are stretched thin trying to resist the Yeerks. An An-dalite task force got hammered in orbit above Earth. One of them, Prince Elfangor, made it to Earth and happened to crash near my friends and me. He gave us the Andalite morphing power. The ability to absorb DNA from any animal, and then actually, literally become that animal. We use that power to resist the Yeerks. "We" being Jake, who is our prematurely middle-aged, fearless more-or-less leader; Cassie, our animal expert and tree-hugging environmental wacko; Rachel, Jake's fabulously beautiful but totally insane cousin; Tobias, who's a mouse-eating bird; the Cinnabon-chomping Andalite scorpion-boy we call Ax; and me, Marco, the sensitive, sensible, smart, and good-looking one. Also modest. And honest. And did I mention cute? Anyway, I was hanging out with my dad around noon on a rainy Saturday, slumped down in the easy chair, staring at the TV, wondering if I had the energy to go into the kitchen to get more Doritos, when the news flash came on. A nuclear sub was reported to have developed 4 reactor problems. It was feared sunk. Rescue ships and divers were on the scene, but the storm was making it hard for them. They couldn't find the sub, which could be dousing everyone on board with radiation. "Oh, man," I groaned. "Yeah," my dad agreed. He was slumped on the couch wondering if he had the energy to go to the kitchen and get his Cheez Puffs. "Urn ..." I said. "Are you going to the kitchen?" he asked hopefully. I sighed. "Actually, I just remembered I'm supposed to help Jake with some work over at his house." "Oh. You'll miss the game," he said. "So before you go, could you grab me the bag of Cheez Puffs? And a soda? And a pillow? And give me the remote control." I carried about twenty-four items to my dad, then took off out into the rain to walk to Jake's house. I had to tell him about the sub. I don't know why, I just had to. I guess I thought we could possibly help. Thirty minutes later, the six of us were assembled on a wet beach. There was absolutely no one in sight. No lifeguards. No little old ladies collecting shells. I mean, it was really raining. We were all soaked through and had wet sand 5 caking our shoes. All except Rachel, who I swear has some magic ability to repel dirt, mud, and rainwater. "Well, we have privacy, that's for sure," Jake said, looking around. "What are we going to do with our outer clothing and shoes?" Cassie wondered. See, we can't morph clothing and shoes. Just things that are skintight. I was wearing bike shorts and a way-too-small, totally uncool T-shirt under my clothes. Those I could morph. "I've said it before, I'll say it again," I said. "We have got to do something about these funky morphing outfits. We are a disgrace to super-heroes. Can you imagine us ever being in a comic book alongside Spider-Man? We'd look like the Clampetts." "The what?" Cassie asked. "You know, the Beverly Hillbillies." "Marco, you do realize that Spider-Man isn't real, right?" Rachel asked. "And even if he was, I don't know what fabric that outfit of his is made from. Never bags at the knees or elbows. I mean, come on." "We'd better get going before someone shows up," Jake said glumly. Jake hates dark, overcast days. It makes him grumpy. We stripped off our outer clothes and shoes and stuffed them into a backpack. We stuck the 6 backpack in one of the blue trash barrels they had along the beach. "Maybe we'll get lucky this time and they won't pick up the trash today," Cassie said. "Yeah, it'd be a shame to lose those jeans of yours," Rachel said. "If your legs shrink five inches those jeans would almost fit." Rachel and Cassie are best friends. But they don't agree on the importance of clothes. Tobias called down from above. Floating over our heads was Tobias, a red-tailed hawk. A wet red-tailed hawk. We heard his thought-speak in our heads. We also knew why he was anxious. Tobias does not like the water. But he was trying to act all macho about it. We waded into the water. Jake, Cassie, Rachel, and me. And Ax. Ax was in his disturbingly attractive human morph. As opposed to his disturbingly, disturbing true Andalite body. He had to return to his own form before he could go into another morph. He'd picked up his newest morph at The Gardens - with Cassie's help, of course. Tobias had to morph straight from his hawk shape. Which, as you can guess, is not all that fun, since a hawk in the surf is pretty helpless. I swam out a ways with the others. Tobias 7 looked around once more with his hawk eyes and pronounced the beach definitely empty. Then he sighed heavily and plunged into the water. I focused my mind on the DNA inside me. I formed the picture of the dolphin in my head. And I began to change. Now you know how I got a blowhole. 8 Cassie I love being a dolphin. How can you not love it? I'm not crazy about morphing insects. Especially the mindless little automatons like termites and ants. But I'm convinced that dolphins have souls. Or maybe it's just some arrangement of DNA-based characteristics that make them seem that way to humans. But whatever it is, whether it's something mystical or something real, I like it. We were in the surf, breasting the waves and staggering against the flow. When the cold water was up to my chest I pushed off and swam. It wasn't easy fighting the waves. Humans are not very strong in the water. 9 As I dog-paddled, I began to morph. My fingers stretched out longer and longer. A webbing grew between them, like a duck's feet. My arm bones shrank and drew this webbed hand toward my body till it was clearly a fin and not a hand any longer. My legs softened. Like overcooked spaghetti, they twined together and melted into the long tail of the dolphin. At the same time my feet twisted outward and thinned to become the tail flukes. Then, as I gasped and spit out mouthfuls of salt water, my flat human mouth and face began to bulge outward. It was like something out of a cartoon. As if I were made of Silly Putty and someone was stretching my face outward. My eyes moved to the side and now my vision was largely filled with my own grinning dolphin snout. More dolphin than human now, I sucked in a last lungful of air through my mouth. When I exhaled, it went out through the blowhole that had appeared where the back of my neck had been. I dove below the churning surface. I was still in shallow water so I could see the sand and gravel and shells being tugged to and fro by the water. Humans may prefer shallow water, but it makes dolphins uneasy. So I kicked my powerful tail and headed away from shore. 10 Think about the happiest day you've ever had in your life. Think of how you feel on a sunny day, with no school and no chores, your allowance fresh in your pocket and some really fun thing awaiting you. That's exactly what it feels like to be a dolphin. Then, to all that good feeling, add this sensation of power, ease, of being the perfectly adapted creature in the perfect place. I yelled, giddy and goofy on the sheer joy of being a dolphin in the sea. And they came. All of them felt the same way. We were on a serious mission. But that didn't mean we couldn't have fun. We raced out to sea, surfacing to deliberately plow into the rising walls of waves. We hurried, but we played the whole way. And then we began to see the helicopters chattering overhead and the Navy ships patrolling back and forth across the sea. The waves were high, the winds, too. When we surfaced it was in the valleys between waves. We'd blow out our stale breath and suck in fresh air, letting the gray waves lift us up so we could see. Jake said. Marco asked. 11 Rachel pointed out. Jake said. I nosed downward and kicked. It was much calmer and quieter below the surface. We were in maybe two hundred feet of water. It's hard to tell, but it looked that deep, anyway. I was swimming about fifty feet down and could just barely see the ghostly glimmer of sand far below me. Mostly what I saw was murky blue. Not even many fish. I fired an echolocation blast from my head. The sound waves spread out, then bounced back. My dolphin brain drew a mental picture of a seabed scarred by a series of deep fissures. I also "saw" divers in the water, and sensors being towed on long cables from the ships above us. Tobias said. <0kay,> Jake agreed. Easier said than done. You ever try and swim while keeping in line with dolphins on your left and right? Plus we had to surface to breathe, and 12 each time we did the waves would push us forward or back. Rachel was on my right. Ax on my left. We advanced across the ocean floor, blasting the water with our ultrasonic sound waves. It had taken forty-five minutes of hard swimming to reach the site. We couldn't go beyond two hours in morph. Not unless we wanted to spend the rest of our lives as dolphins. Forty-five minutes to get there. Forty-five to get back to shore. That only left thirty minutes to search. Not enough. But twenty minutes later I saw, or felt, a strange picture in my head. I fired a new echolocation blast and "listened" carefully. Yes, something weird. Something definitely weird. Something too "hard." I said. In a few seconds, Rachel said, Ax said. I said. Rachel suggested. Rachel almost always likes the direct approach. And in this case, she was right. We needed to get this done with fast. We needed to wrap this up and bail. <0kay,> I said, Marco said. I said. It was easy to find a diver. Their wet-suited bodies and stream of bubbles showed up nice and clear on echolocation. 15 The diver ignored us as we drew near. We were just a pod of dolphins swimming by. We weren't what she was interested in. I swam around behind her. The others followed. <0kay, now, we can't help but scare the poor woman, but be as gentle as you can be,> I said. One thing you can say about dolphins: There is nothing they can't do in the water. The six of us moved like a well-drilled acrobatic team or something. Hand, leg, hand, leg, we had the diver before she knew what was happening. The others lightly gripped the wetsuit with their dolphin teeth. "Mblo bio blm blmo!" She yelled. At least that's what it sounded like. Rachel dug her nose in the small of the woman's back. I nosed her neck, and together the six of us propelled her through the water, almost standing upright, at a speed that must have seemed pretty amazing to her. She struggled, of course. I think for a moment she thought we were sharks. I could see wide, scared eyes through her face mask when she turned to look back. But maybe she'd heard stories about dolphins helping drowning people. Or maybe she just liked dolphins. Maybe it was just so obvious we 16 were on a mission. After a few seconds, she relaxed. We let her go and I swam up and offered a dorsal fin. She took it. Cassie came up on her other side. And now she cooperated with us, holding on to our dorsal fins as we raced more easily ahead. We stopped directly over the sub. The diver couldn't see it since it was way below us. But we made a nice show of racing down, then back up, so she'd know what we were doing. Unfortunately, all this took time. Too much time. We had no choice but to demorph in the open sea. We swam half a mile away from the search area and demorphed. Bad for most of us. Worse for Tobias, wallowing with waterlogged feathers in salt water. Ax, in his own body, could swim quite well. We remorphed as soon as we could. And now, with plenty of time, we went back to the site. We had to make sure the divers were there. Tobias said when we got back to the site. A small submersible was already pulling away from the submarine. I guess it was some kind of rescue vehicle for taking people off sunken submarines. We hovered above the sunken sub. It was 17 wedged deep in the fissure. It was hard to see how they'd ever get it out. Ax said. A second small submersible was on its way down. It was zipping along. And the divers were all heading for the surface. I winced. The purpose of this kind of submarine was a little embarrassing to explain to an alien. Marco explained. I said, feeling fairly idiotic. Marco said brightly. Rachel asked. Cassie said. 18 I looked down. The rescue vehicle was already pulling away from the sub. But instead of heading up to the surface, it was simply racing away. Like it was desperate to put some distance between it and the sub. Tobias said. <0utta here!> I yelled. We turned and took off. We powered our tails and tore through the water like torpedoes. The rescue vehicle was a quarter mile ahead of us. I lost sight of it when we shot to the surface to breathe. Up, suck in air, down and swim, and up, suck in air, down and swim. It was slower going on the surface, but we needed to breathe because we were straining every muscle in our bodies. Rachel said. Flash! A light so bright it seemed to burn right through me. WHAAAAAAM! The shock wave hit us. I tumbled through a world that was being torn apart at the seams. And then that world went black. 19 Rachel I don't know how long I was unconscious. But when I came to I was on the surface of the water. I was lolling there like some kind of dead fish. First thought: Where are the others? Second thought: How long have I been in morphl I yelled in thought-speak. No answer. I moved my tail and flippers. Okay, at least I wasn't injured. I dove below the surface and looked around. The water was clearer than it had been. Strange, given the fact that a nuclear warhead had just exploded. 20 Marco answered. He glided up beside me. I fired an echolocation burst. Fish. A pair of distant whales. No dolphins. Although if they were floating on the surface they might not show up. Marco said. I'd been about to say there was no sun. But the golden rays were piercing the water around me. We dove down deep. We looked up. And there, outlined against the sun, were four tapered shapes. I said and shot toward them. I bonked one of them with my nose. Tobias yelped. Marco said. he grumbled. That's when we noticed the blood leaking from her eyes and blowhole. <0h, oh, it hurts!> Jake yelled. Gradually the gray rubbery flesh melted away and a human girl emerged. As she demorphed, the dolphin's pain was left behind. I nuzzled in close, giving her a dorsal fin to hang onto. "Wow, that really hurt," she said calmly, once her human mouth was back in place. She looked around. "Why is the water so calm? Why is it sunny?" She lifted herself up a foot out of the water, using Jake and me as support. Then she settled back. "Urn ... am I awake?" <0f course.> "And this isn't a dream?" Marco said. "You're sure this is reality?" Cassie asked before I could make a crushing remark to Marco about the total impossibility of Carmen Electra ever even looking at him. Jake said. 22 "Okay. Then why is there a volcano over there?" No one said anything for a few seconds. Then all at once we dove down under, leaving Cassie floundering and yelling, "Hey!" I dove down twenty feet, turned and powered my way straight up. I exploded from the water, smooth and sleek as a missile. I shot up into the air, up where I could see beyond the tops of the short, choppy waves. I took a look. Then, too stunned to line up for a dive, I belly flopped. The first dolphin in history to belly flop. Tobias agreed. Jake asked. "We have to get back! People could be hurt!" I said. Volcanoes don't just suddenly erupt. Besides, look how high that thing was. That takes hundreds of years of lava and ash building up.> Jake demanded. 23 I mumbled. But they all just waited. Waited to hear how I knew about volcanoes. <0h, all right. It was the Magic School Bus, okay? They went into a volcano^ Ax said politely. I said, dismissing it. Ax said. "Uh . . . what is that?" Cassie asked. She was staring hard, but she started to morph back into dolphin. " That!" I turned to follow the direction of her stare. We all turned. It rose ten feet from the water. A very long neck. Like a gray-green giraffe. On the end of that neck was a sculpted, streamlined head about two feet long. And coming up, right behind it, was another tall neck and head. 24 Tobias whispered. Marco cried. I said. Tobias said again. Cassie said. Ax said smugly, 25 To bias L knew what it was. Or at least I knew what it looked like. But I wasn't about to say anything. If I was wrong, Marco would tease me about it till the day I died. Besides, it was impossible. Totally impossible. So I didn't say anything. But oh, man, I hauled my dolphin tail out of there. Jake said. We were plowing up the now-placid water. We were going flat out. But the creatures were gaining on us. And the whole time in my head I was going, No way, no way. 26 And yet with each glance at those long necks, with each flash of those snake heads, I became more convinced. The creatures were no more than a hundred feet back. Jake said grimly. Rachel said. I liked Rachel even before I became a hawk. But now I really like her. She could be a bird of prey. She'd be a natural. But she was wrong this time. I said. she said. SHWOOOOSH! Coming up from below. Like some weird, massively oversized dolphin. Forty . . . fifty feet long! An impossibly huge jaw open wide. We'd been watching the creatures chasing us. All I had time to see of this new threat was the flash of teeth. It had me. No time to move. Up, up, up I went! High into the air, trapped in those massive jaws as it broke the surface. 27 It tossed me up. Just like I'd seen seabirds do with a fish. Tossed me up, opened its massive jaws, and swallowed me whole. I was being swallowed! I was unconscious, then conscious again, then unconscious. I hit water. No, not water! Too warm. Hot. Burning! My skin was burning! I was blind. Deaf, except for the sound of churning. And the steady bass drum of a heart beating. Then, something else beside me. My dolphin sense knew. It was another dolphin. an enraged voice cried. I said. Rachel said. I said. I could already feel her changing. I felt human fingers pressed against me in the gnashing, enclosed space. She was right. No other choice. And I wasn't going to let her do it alone. 28 I had very few morphs available to me. And only one that would help here. But first I had to revert to bird form. Something like a rock was in the stomach. It was grinding against me with the movements of the stomach wall. And as I lost the tough hide of a dolphin and regained the fragile hollow bones of my own hawk body, the beating became deadly. Even Rachel's body was crushing me, as her elbows and fists and knees were shoved against me, time and again. But all that was nothing compared to one simple fact: I couldn't breathe. Suffocating! I moaned. Rachel couldn't answer. She was human again. But I knew she must be suffocating, too. My left wing was broken. My tail was a mess. I was wracked with pain. But none of that mattered because I was going down now. Sinking and swirling down a long, black well. Too late to morph again. I knew it. I was done. And my last conscious thought was a flash of myself, years earlier, back when I was still completely human. I saw myself playing with the little plastic figurine - a plastic toy model of the 29 animal whose belly I was in. A booklet had come with the figurine. I'd memorized all the facts in that booklet. I thought as my mind shut down. 30 Jake Cassie screamed. I knew. I'd been on the surface when the monster had snatched them up and tossed them down its throat. But I couldn't think about that. I still had three people with me. I had to save them. The long-necked creatures were behind us, the larger one in front. Which would eat us? I said. Marco began. I roared. Down we went. Down fifty, sixty, seventy feet. The monsters were like ships overhead. The two long-necked ones started to dive after us. Then 31 they hesitated. The larger creature, the one that had gotten Rachel and Tobias, was closing in. I said. Cassie said. I demanded. Cassie cried in thought-speak. Marco and Ax each bit down on a flipper and dragged Cassie away. I felt sick inside. Mad at Cassie, scared, beaten, and for some reason even mad at Rachel and Tobias. But mostly I felt sick. What was happening? We swam away as fast as we could move. I heard a screeching roar of rage reverberating through the water. The monsters were fighting. We swam toward shore. And after a while Cassie swam on her own. The sea floor beneath us sloped up and up, rising to meet us. When we were in no more than five feet of water, we began to demorph. I hoped 32 we could do it. I didn't know how long we'd been in morph. I gratefully resumed my own body. I lifted myself sluggishly out of the water and staggered up the beach. I flopped facedown, then rolled over. Cassie and Marco came seconds later. Ax took a few extra minutes and appeared in human morph. "Something is very wrong, Prince Jake," he said. I didn't answer. Of course something was wrong. Rachel and Tobias were probably dead. So something would always be wrong now. Forever. "Jake, Ax is right," Marco said. "Get up. Look at this!" I stood up. Marco, Ax, and Cassie were all staring, openmouthed, across the beach toward the boardwalk. There was no boardwalk. No hot dog stands, no Ferris wheel, no video arcades. No buildings at all. No people. Nothing but a line of trees pressing right up against the sand. And off above the trees, the cone of the volcano with a tall plume of smoke. "This isn't home," Marco said. "What is going on here?" I wondered. I slogged up the beach toward the trees. I expected to see something behind the trees. But 33 behind the front row of trees were just more trees. Far off, through gaps in the tree trunks, I caught glimpses of an open space. But I was seeing grass and flowers there, not a city. Marco and Cassie came up behind me. "Listen," Marco said. "Listen to what?" "The quiet. Just the breeze in the trees." Cassie said, "No seagulls. There are always gulls." I had noticed something else. "There's no trash. No old soda cans. No candy wrappers. Nothing. I mean, nothing." "So, what happened?" Marco asked. "That explosion blew us halfway around the planet to some desert island somewhere in the middle of nowhere?" I shrugged. Most of my brain was still focused on Rachel and Tobias. I wasn't tracking. And yet I felt a nagging sense of urgency. A little voice telling me to get it together. A little warning voice telling me we were not safe. I turned around. "Ax! What are you doing?" He was about a hundred yards down the beach. "I'm trying to understand something, Prince Jake." I headed toward him. The sand was darker and rougher than I remembered. But then, who knew where we were? The tracks I saw in the 34 sand seemed to have been made by large birds. I got this sudden, illogical rush, thinking maybe they'd been left by Tobias. They looked like they'd been made by talons. But of course that was impossible. I had gotten Tobias and Rachel killed. If only I'd been watching ahead instead of looking behind, I could have seen the threat coming. I should have had everyone morph to shark. Then we could have fought. Should have, should have. "No footprints," Cassie said. "No human footprints, anyway." We reached Ax. He was staring toward the trees. I followed the direction of his look. There was a sort of alleyway through the trees. Some were bent aside. Some had the branches on one side broken, hanging limp with dying leaves. Other trees were simply snapped. Broken. And all along this "alleyway" the top third of the trees seemed to have been stripped of leaves. Marco stared, too. He bumped into me and shoved me into a hole in the sand. I was going to shove him back, but this was no time to be playing around. "I am still unfamiliar with some Earth creatures," Ax said. "Cuh-ree-chers. Tell me, what sort of creature can do that?" "Probably a tornado or something," I said 35 vaguely. "I've seen things like that on TV when there's been a tornado." "Ah," Ax said. "Does a tornado have feet?" I almost smiled. "No. A tornado is a wind storm." "I see. Then this was not caused by a tornado. Whatever did this has feet." "How do you know?" Cassie asked. "Because Prince Jake is standing in one of the footprints." I looked down. It could have been the footprint of an elephant. Except that the toes were more like claws. Plus, the print sank at least six inches into the sand. And oh, yes: It was about four feet across 36 C a s s i e j, Jake jumped up out of that footprint like it was filled with rattlesnakes. We stared at the footprint. Then we looked up and stared at the alleyway that something had made through the trees. Then we stared at the way the leaves had been stripped from a lot of the highest branches of the trees. "Jake, something ate those leaves," I pointed out. "Those trees are like thirty feet tall," Jake said. "There are a cluster of these same footprints over there." Ax pointed about ten feet away. 37 "And all across there it's as if the sand has been swept. Swe-put. Swep-tuh." Jake looked at me. "Cassie, do you know anything that could possibly have this footprint?" Jake thinks I'm some kind of animal expert. I shook my head. "What it looks like is some very, very large animal came through those woods. It was munching the top leaves of the trees. Like a giraffe would do. Then it hit the water here. It turned around. That's the cluster of prints there. And it has an insanely long tail. That's the swept area. Once it was turned around, it went back the way it came." "A giraffe?" Jake asked. "Not a giraffe," I said. Jake looked a little confused. We all were, but he's the one who gets stuck making the decisions. I felt sorry for him. He'd been right to drag me away from those sea monsters. I should have told him that. But poor Rachel. Poor Tobias. What was I ever going to do without Rachel? Rachel had been my best friend forever. I couldn't imagine not seeing her every day. I realized I was crying. I guess I had been, off and on, since we'd dragged up out of the sea. I felt Jake's arm go around my shoulders. "Don't cry, Cassie. Don't give up on Rachel and 38 Tobias. You know Rachel. If there's a way to survive, she'll find it." I wiped my tears. "Yeah. You're right. And we have to focus here." He took his arm away and suddenly seemed awkward. I think he expected Marco to make some smirky remark. But Marco has a good heart. He knows when to let things go. Besides, I knew Marco was almost as sad as I was. "What should we do, Prince Jake?" Ax wondered. "Have I mentioned don't call me prince?" Jake said automatically. "Yes, Prince Jake, you have." Jake looked around. "I guess we go that way," he said, pointing to the forest. "But not along that path. Whatever crushed those trees and made these tracks, we don't want to run into it. But obviously, wherever we are - some island somewhere, Africa, South America - wherever we are, there have to be people, right? Just not here on the beach. So let's go find them." I found myself looking back at the sea, at the surf that lapped almost peacefully on the coarse dark sand. Was she still alive somehow? Jake was right: If anyone could get swallowed by a whale - or whatever that thing had been - and survive, it was Rachel. 39 "I caught a glimpse of a clearing way back in the trees," I said. "Could be a village there." Jake led the way into the trees. The sun was shut out by the tall, spreading branches. There were vines hanging down and crawling up the trunks of trees. And huge ferns so big you could hide in them. We struck a stream, maybe fifteen feet across. Both banks of the river were lined by magnolias, dogwoods, and massive fig trees. "This is not anywhere near being home," I said. "This is more like tropical vegetation." "It's humid enough, that's for sure," Marco complained. "I wonder if the water's okay to drink?" Jake asked. Then, with a shrug, he dropped to his knees and dipped his hand in. He brought the water to his mouth and sipped. "I guess we can always get a bunch of shots for whatever disease is in the water," I said. I dropped beside him and tasted the water. The humidity hadn't seemed so bad down by the ocean. But now it was dehydrating me. I was massively thirsty. "It's probably okay," I said. "Usually running water -" FWOOOSH! A huge head exploded from the water. SNAP! 40 A jaw six feet long slammed shut with a sound like steel on steel. The jaw snapped shut so close to my face that it grazed my nose. I leaped back. Fell on my butt. Spun, jumped up, and bolted. "That was one big honkin' crocodile!" Marco yelled as he ran beside me. We stopped beneath a huge tree. Four of us, all panting. "That wasn't right," I gasped. "Yeah, no kidding," Marco said. "No, I mean it was too big. The jaw was too long and thin." "I am really not liking this," Jake muttered. "What were those things in the ocean? What made that footprint? Where on Earth are we that has crocodiles that size? I mean, we've seen crocodiles. That was one way, way big croc." "Prince Jake, I am going to demorph," Ax said. "Have you been in morph too long?" Jake asked with a frown. "No. But I am frightened," Ax replied. "I don't want to have to fight in this weak human body." "Yeah, go ahead," Jake said. "Cassie, I don't mean to hit you with this, but you know more about animals than any of us. Where the - where on Earth are we?" 41 "I don't know," I admitted. "Giant crocodiles, huge, aggressive whales or whatever, like nothing I've ever even heard of, and something big enough to leave a footprint you could turn into a wading pool. I just don't know." "Okay, fine," he said, obviously frustrated. "Let's try it another way. Ax, you know more about physics and so on than any of us -" "More than any human," Ax said. He was de-morphing but was still mostly human. "Whatever. Just tell me how an explosion could have blown us all the way to, I don't know, Madagascar or wherever, without killing us." "Madagascar?" Marco asked. "It couldn't," Ax said simply. "Great. Great. That clears everything up just fine. This is nuts." He sighed. He looked at me and shrugged. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe when we find some people they can tell us where we are." We walked on, heading toward the clearing. The forest had become a frightening place to us. Everything was wrong. Out of place somehow, in some way I couldn't quite explain. How had the storm and rain suddenly become humid sunlight? How had we gone into the water off a beach fronted by a boardwalk and come out at a beach fronted by forest? "Maybe it's all a dream," Marco said, as if 42 he'd been reading my thoughts. "In which case, I'd like to dream about a nice, ice-cold Coke." He held out his hand, curved around an imaginary bottle. "Hmm. So much for the dream theory." We were almost to the clearing now. I could see bright, buttery sunlight through the trees. But massive ferns blocked my view of the clearing itself. "Let's get out from under these trees," I said. "We'll think better in the open. And maybe there will be some people." "Too bad they'll speak Madagascarese," Marco said. "Shhh!" I froze. "What?" "Shhhh! Listen!" A grunting, snuffling sound to our left. Then the sound of greenery being rustled. Then more snuffling. The sound of... eating? "Something munching leaves," I said. "There's been way too much munching already," Marco muttered. "No, it's okay," I said. "If it eats plants, it won't eat us. Could be a cow. If it's a cow, maybe it belongs to someone." "And if it doesn't belong to anyone, maybe we can eat it. I'm starving." We threaded our way cautiously toward the sound. The closer we got, the more confident I 43 was. Yes, something was grazing. But did cows eat leaves? No. Deer, maybe? I pushed aside a fern frond. And there it was. It was perhaps twenty feet long from head to tail. It stood on four elephantlike legs. It had a long neck that made up a third of its length and was balanced by the long tail of equal length. Along its back were bumpy, bony things, like armor plating that only covered that one area. For about two minutes I don't think one of us drew a breath. We just stared. "I think it's a baby," I said. "A baby?" Marco said. "Cassie, it's a dinosaur." Suddenly. Crash! Crash! CRASH! CRASH! From behind us! "HuuuuRROOOOAAARR!" The ground shook from the impact of its huge, taloned feet. The blast of its roar shivered the leaves and buckled my knees. I spun around just in time to see it leap. It jumped over us like we weren't even there. Jumped over us with its awful, hawklike talons. It landed with one huge foot on the ground and one holding the side of the "little" dinosaur. Down came the head. That huge square, familiar head. The Tyrannosaurus opened its massive jaws 44 and closed them at the base of the baby dinosaur's neck. I didn't know what was happening. My mind was gone. Gone in out-of-control terror. We ran. 45 Chapter 8 Rachel I was human! A human gasping for air inside the belly of the creature. My lungs were screaming and heaving. I was blind. My skin was burning. I was being pum-meled, crushed, smashed, beaten. I was getting mad. I knew Tobias was there, too, but I had no idea where. He wasn't thought-speaking. Morph! I told myself. But already I was weakening. The human body can't last long without air. I tried to focus. But my head was swirling. I wanted to just give up. Why fight it? I was done for. Not yet, you're not done for, Rachel, I told 46 myself. Not yet. I might not survive, but by God, I was going to deal with this creature before I went down. From far off I could sense the changes occurring. I knew I was growing. But too weak ... too weak ... no time ... no time. And once I dug out I'd find water. Not air. Air. I needed air. Some nagging part of my brain kept saying, "Lungs!" I felt like saying, "Yes, I know. I'm suffocating. I know all about my lungs. They hurt. They're heaving, gasping, crying for air." And I swear, as I swirled down into the darkness, there came a voice, clear as a bell in my head. My own voice, but from outside of my own head. "No, you idiot," it said. "Not your lungs. Duh." It was the weirdest thing. But suddenly I could see myself clearly. I even knew that I was halfway morphed. I had blond hair on my head and coarse brown fur on my face. I was crushed inside the gizzard of the beast. A tiny, crumpled bundle of feathers was pressed against me. I could see it all. But better than that, I could see what the voice meant. I was enclosed in a cage made up of massive ribs. But right there, just a foot away, was air. I drew back my massive paw. The paw of a 47 grizzly bear. A paw that could destroy a man with a single, backhanded swipe. I drew that paw back and I extended my wicked, hooked claws, and I thrust that paw straight out. I twisted and pushed. The twist ripped and the power of the thrust dug my paw deep into the creature's in-sides. "HREEEEE-UH!" I heard its scream. It reverberated through the flesh that pressed all around me. I thrust and twisted. "HREEEEE-UH!" Another scream. A spasm that wracked the body so powerfully it almost knocked me out. But I was not so easily crushed now. I was no longer human. I had finished morphing the grizzly bear. And not even this sea monster could digest a grizzly bear. With my last ounce of strength, I thrust and twisted. SHWOOOOOSH! Air! Air poured in. I gasped at it. Air! I had done it. I had ripped a hole out of the gizzard and penetrated the creature's lungs. I went back to work, ripping now with both huge paws. Digging downward to avoid the ribs. Suddenly water gushed in. Salt water. Cold 48 and wonderful. I kicked and clawed the opening till it was bigger. Then I tumbled out. I hit bottom. I looked up, dazed and disoriented. The creature had beached itself. I was in no more than five or six feet of water. I stood up, my huge bear head broke the surface, and I reared up on my hind legs. Tobias was fluttering weakly in the water. I grabbed him up as gently as I could with bear paws. I lumbered toward shore and set him down on dry land. he asked. I said. I reared up to my full height and took a look around. I could tell that we had run up into the mouth of a river. The riverbanks were steep on our side of the river. My pathetically dim bear vision could barely make out some vague shapes moving on the far bank. I sniffed the air. The grizzly sense of smell is excellent. What I smelled was puzzling. I shook my huge head. Tobias stood up shakily on his talons. I glared at him. I demanded. I was getting annoyed at the way Tobias sounded. Like he was about to say something important, only he couldn't quite spit it out. I waited for him to laugh at his own joke. Only he didn't laugh. <0h, man. Tobias, we are gonna need some better morphs.> 51 Tobias I was in pain. I didn't want to mention it, though. What was the point? I had very few morphs, unlike the others. We were on land now. A dolphin morph wasn't any use. The only useful morph I had was my human one. But somehow a human body seemed pathetically weak in a world of dinosaurs. At least in my own hawk body I could fly away from danger. Unfortunately, my hawk body was a mess. Rachel wondered. I tried to extend my broken wing. 52 I lied. High above me the huge bear head looked down at me. <0kay.> It felt weird going human. I'd only done it a few times since the Ellimist had given me back my morph ing power. Now I felt my feathers itching as they melted into flesh. My sight grew dim, my hearing became muddy. I rose up, tall, large, clunky, awkward . . . human. "At least the pain is gone now," I said. "Now to get feathery again." A few minutes later, I was my normal - okay, my abnormal - self. Unfortunately . . . Rachel said, sounding outraged. I laughed grimly. <0h, man,> Rachel moaned. <0h, man,> Rachel said again. She began to demorph. The massive shoulders and head, the lumbering haunches, the shaggy fur, the huge, powerful paws, all shrank and melted. Gradually a very beautiful human girl emerged. Rachel looked down at her morphing outfit. It was a black, one-piece leotard. "Okay, so I go to the bare midriff look," she said. She tried to tear a hole in the fabric. "My fingernails are too short." She bent close and I used my beak to make a tear in the fabric. 54 From that first tear Rachel quickly ripped off three strips of black nylon. "I just have one thing to say, Tobias. Don't break another wing. I mean, this doesn't look bad - it could actually be kind of a fashion statement - but any more and we'd be getting embarrassing." "Yeah, right." She gathered up some twigs that had been deposited along the river's edge. "What do you think? These okay?" Rachel looked alarmed. I said. But silently I added, / hope. She took my broken wing very gently. "I can tell where it's broken. I'll straighten it, then put a stick on each side and tie it up, right?" Rachel took a deep breath. "On the count of three. One . . . two ..." I yelled, as sharp pain shot up my wing. "Sorry! Sorry!" she cried. 55 I yelled. She held the bone in place with one hand. It hadn't broken into separate pieces, it had just snapped. But it was agonizing. No matter how she tried, she couldn't keep from bending the bone slightly. She grabbed the two sticks with her left hand and managed to line them up against the bone. She transferred the pressure to her left hand and there came a new wave of pain, so severe it made me sick inside. She quickly wound one strip around my wing. I said. "It'll hurt you." She tightened and I tried not to scream. The other two strips went on easier. She checked the knots, then sat back and wiped her face with the back of her hand. She was sweating and pale. "I don't know how Cassie does things like that," she said. She stood up, and for the first time with decent eyes, looked across the river at the small hadrosaur herd. "Oh, my God. What is this, Jurassic Park!" 56 Rachel glared at me. "I've known you a long time, Tobias. I don't remember you ever talking about dinosaurs." I said. We started to climb up the bank of the river. Or to be more accurate, Rachel started to climb, and I perched like so much dead, useless weight on her shoulder. It was a struggle to hold on without digging my talons into her skin. I'm sure I hurt her. But Rachel, being Rachel, said nothing. We reached the top of the bank. We were in a sea of grass that extended alongside the river-bank. Beyond the grass was a line of dark, forbidding trees. Here and there I saw flashes of color: flowers. And then there was the volcano. I said. "So what's the difference between Jurassic and Cretaceous?" "So in the Cretaceous Age there's probably just the leftover dinosaurs. Not like the ones in Jurassic Park." I said. She looked hard at me. "You're not going to tell me what I hope you're not going to tell me, are you?" 58 M a r c o CRASH! CRASH! CRASH! The ground shook! "HrrrrRRROOOOAAAARRR-unh!" It was so loud it had to be right behind me! I was screaming. I was crying as I ran. It was panic. Pure panic. Leaves slapped my face. Twigs whipped my bare arms. I glanced back. Through my blurring tears I saw it bounding, leaping, running after us. Forty feet long, from head to tail. Twelve thousand pounds. Seven-inch, serrated-edged teeth. But it was the eyes that were the worst. They were intelligent, eager eyes. Hungry eyes. Eyes that seemed almost to laugh at me, helpless creature that I was. 59 Could I morph? Morph what? Morph what? There was nothing that could stand against a Tyrannosaurus rex. Nothing! My gorilla morph? The Tyrannosaurus would eat it in two bites. I saw flashes of the others, all in flat-out panic run. It would have us all. None of us could fight it. Not even Ax, who was pulling ahead of the stumbling humans. No! Wait! There was a way! "Get small!" I screamed. "Morph small!" The words tore my throat as I yelled. Wham! The root seemed to reach up out of the ground to grab my foot. I hit hard. I sucked air but nothing came. My lungs were emptied. Heart pounding. The others kept running. Didn't realize I'd fallen. Roll! I rolled over just as the impossibly big talon came raking down. WHAMMM! The tyrannosaur's foot hit like a dropped safe. I bounced from the impact. Down came the head, teeth flashing, eyes greedy for my flesh. I sucked in a breath. Rolled, scrambled, tripped, kicked forward and landed in a fern at the base of a tree. The tree trunk was no more than a foot in diameter. I pulled myself behind it. No way to hide. 60 The dinosaur kicked at me with one foot. I dodged. "Morph, you idiot!" someone yelled at me. I recognized my own voice, but I couldn't imagine speaking the words. What? What could I morph? What was small enough? SCRRRRRAACK! WHAAAMMM! A talon came down and scraped the bark off the tree before it hit. I yanked my leg out a split second before it would have been crushed. Talon? Yes, huge bird feet. Bird, that was the trick. See if the big, evil creep could fly! I focused some part of my mind on the image of an osprey. Small, too small for the T-rex to care about. And it could fly. I felt the changes begin, but the Tyranno-saurus hadn't gotten to be the biggest flesh-eater in history by being stupid. It came around the tree for me. And now my body was growing clumsy as my hands shrank and my legs thinned. You have no concept of how powerful that Tyrannosaurus was. You cannot possibly even begin to understand till you've cowered beneath it, peeing in your pants, and wanting to dig a hole in the dirt. I scrambled around the tree. Jaws opened four feet wide and snapped shut an inch from my head. 61 "Aaaahhhh!" I screamed in sheer terror. The big lizard dodged the other way and it roared in frustration. He was so close I felt the sound waves. I saw his pebbly-skinned throat vibrate. And worse, I saw into his mouth. A mouth glittering with teeth like butchers' knives and stained with the blood of his last kill. I scrambled away again, stiff, barely able to move. CRUNCH! The Tyrannosaurus chomped its jaws shut on the tree itself. He began to twist and rip the tree, like a dog with a bone. Rending, tearing, bark flying, white wood pulp chewed to chips. In a few seconds the tree would no longer be between us. And already I was too far morphed to run to another tree. "Grrr-UNCH! Grrr-UNCH! Scree-EEEE-EEEE-crrUNCH! RrrrOOOAAAARRR!" The Tyrannosaurus had gone mad with frustration. It was screaming in rage, ripping, grinding, throwing its huge weight back and forth. Shaking the ground. Bruising the air with its insane roar. Just a few seconds more and . . . Crrr-SNAP! The tree fell slowly away, crashing down through layers of vines and ferns. The Tyrannosaurus lunged, mouth open, red tongue lolling, teeth wet with drool. 62 I tried to leap back. I fell. Rolled. Thrashed, out of control. Wings! I had wings! Too late! The mouth came down over me like some kind of earthmover, like a diesel shovel. A prison of teeth all round me. The jaw bit into the dirt itself. A root! Teeth snagged by a root. I flapped, ran, beat, rolled, scrambled. Out between the jaws! Running on osprey talons, running, wings open, flapping. SNAP! Jaws an inch behind my tail. Fly, fly, fly you idiot! Bonk. I never saw the tree trunk. I hit it head-on. I was stunned, senseless, helpless. The Tyrannosaurus roared in triumph. It towered above me, huge, irresistible. Pure destruction. Why had it chased me? I wondered. Why? I was too small, wasn't I? But of course. I'd been in predator morph before. I knew why. Because killing was what it did. Killing was what it was. It had gone beyond food or hunger now. It simply wanted to do what it did best. I flapped weakly, too dazed to move. Down came the head. Down from so far above. Down it came. 63 A swift movement to my right. What was it? Fwapp! Fwapp! Fwapp! An Andalite tail, too fast to be seen, struck three times. The dinosaur swung its head hard. Ax went flying and rolled twice as he hit the ground. The T-rex sagged. Tried to roar. And fell. Human hands snatched me up as six tons of malevolence fell to the ground. 64 I wiped my tail blade on some large leaves. Unfortunately, more than my tail was stained. My human friends were all looking at the big creature. Marco was becoming human again. I was busy trembling. "Nice work, Ax," Prince Jake said. He slapped his hand on my shoulder. It is a thing humans do to indicate friendship or congratulations. Sometimes they do it to kill small insects called mosquitoes. Marco said, still more osprey than human. I said. "I can't believe you took that monster down," Prince Jake said. 65 "You're just being modest," Cassie said. I said, more sharply than I'd intended. "Oh," Prince Jake said. "Yeah, well, you came through big time on this go-round," Marco said. He held his hands out straight. They were trembling. "I can't stop shaking." "This is insane," Cassie said. She looked around carefully. Peering cautiously, looking, no doubt, for others of the big creatures. "What is going on? Why are there dinosaurs here? Where is here?" She shook her head violently. "No. Not in millions of years, anyway. Tens of millions, probably. No, there is no place on Earth where tyranno-saurs just run around in the woods." "Yeah, I think we'd have heard about it in school," Marco said. I believe his tone of voice indicated something the humans call "dry hu- 66 mor." I have not heard any wet humor, so it is difficult for me to tell the difference. My immediate terror was fading. A deeper pessimism was setting in. It was easy to see that humans - or Andalites - deprived of the power of civilization were pathetically weak in this environment. "Some kind of real-life Jurassic Park7." Prince Jake speculated. "Maybe someone actually did it. You know, cloned DNA from old dinosaur bones." I said. Prince Jake raised one eyebrow and looked at me. "Millions of years?" <0nce a Sario Rip - a time-rift - is created, there is no difference between a year and a million years. The energy required is the same. I think I remember the equations ... in an equation where t is time, z is Zero-space, w inversely cubed represents the nexus of -> "Uh-uh," Marco said, raising his hand. "You saved my life. Don't undo it by killing me with algebra." "How do we get back?" Cassie asked. I asked. Then I laughed. I knew I shouldn't, but you have to admit, it was funny. My human friends stared at me. "So the Andalite Toys 'R' Us must be a wild place, huh?" Marco said. "Let's focus here," Prince Jake said impatiently. "Rachel and Tobias may have been killed. In any case, there's nothing we can do about it. We are millions of years in our own past, and there's nothing we can do about that. We're in the age of dinosaurs, and none of our morphs can even begin to fight things like ..." He jerked his thumb at the massive corpse. ". . . like that. So the question is: What do we do?" Prince Jake had summed up the situation very well. We were trapped in an exceedingly 68 dangerous world where we could do almost nothing to defend ourselves. I turned my stalk eyes toward the Tyran-nosaurus's head. The mouth was partly open. The sight of those teeth made my insides watery all over again. I could see the serration on the back side of the teeth. Like shark teeth, only much, much bigger. I had a clear mental picture of what would have happened if the creature had turned a little faster to confront me. The jaws closing over the upper half of my body ... a violent shake of the head to rip me into easy-to-swallow pieces . . . "We adapt," Cassie said grimly. "That's what animals have to do in order to survive. Our environment is massively different. No civilization to rely on, surrounded by brutal predators. So we adapt. Or we get eaten." "Great. Robinson Crusoe meets Jurassic Park. Look at us. We have nothing," Marco said. "No homes. No food. No tools. No weapons. We don't even have shoes!" "Well, we're going to have to make all those things," Prince Jake said. "And we do have one big weapon: We can still morph. Maybe we can't fight a T-rex, but we can fly, and we can escape." "We have food and shoes right here," Cassie said. She was looking at the dead Tyrannosaurus. "Ax has his tail. We can use the hide to make 69 sandals. Skin from the lower leg there looks pretty tough and thick. We cut out some skin, remove the meat and eat it. Then we use ligaments and tendons to lace up the sandals." I believe Prince Jake and Marco were shocked. Humans are strangely squeamish at times. I can never predict when. "Wow," Marco said. "Wow. You're kind of getting into this, aren't you, Cassie?" Cassie walked up to the dinosaur and placed one hand on its leg. She tested the skin with her fingertips. "Look, Marco, my best friend is gone. Tobias is gone. I don't want any more names added to that list. We need food. There's no Burger King anywhere nearby, okay? We're not big or mean enough to be predators in this environment. We've moved way down on the food chain. The best we can be is scavengers. Here's thousands of pounds of protein. We eat some now, and we smoke some for jerky so we can eat later." If anything, Prince Jake and Marco appeared even more shocked. And I felt the same. This was an aspect of Cassie I'd never seen. But then, Cassie is more involved than the others in the facts of environment. She had sized up the situation and realized that in this new world she and her fellow humans were no longer masters. I began to feel a little better about our 70 chances. Humans may be technologically primitive, not to mention physically weak, what with tottering around on two spindly legs. But if you're in a situation that requires instant adaptability to change, you should always have a couple of humans along with you. Cassie looked at me, making eye contact with my main eyes. "Ax, are you okay doing this? Your tail is all we have." "Okay, then. Jake, maybe you and Marco could gather up any dry sticks and dry grass you can find nearby. We have to work fast. We aren't the only animals who'll be after this much meat. Ax? I need you to slice this area of leg into squares, each about one foot square." I glanced at Prince Jake. Prince Jake smiled and shrugged. "Cassie's the boss on this," he said. "She has a clue. I don't. And we all know Marco doesn't." "You got that right," Marco agreed. I turned all my eyes on the haunch of the dead creature. I took careful aim and began the work. 71 Rachel My feet were torn bloody. I was leaving traces of red on the razor-edged saw grass. The legs of my leotard were torn and tattered. It was not a good look. The bare midriff thing, maybe. The fringe look? No. I was carrying Tobias in my arms. He couldn't fly. He was too slow at walking. And if I carried him perched on my shoulder, no matter how careful he was, the jerking and wobbling would force him to dig his talons into my skin. Not fun. Especially not fun because the whole time I was expecting some murderous dinosaur to come ripping out of the woods to our left. Tobias asked. 72 "Sure. No problem," I said, trying to sound cheerful. "I could stand a little less humidity, maybe." His groan of pain made me feel guilty for thinking about my own problems. "Tobias, maybe you should morph to human for a while." "No, no, it's not that. It's just that your wing is hurting you. If you were in human morph, there wouldn't be any pain." "You could just stay human. Permanently. There are worse things." He didn't say anything for a while. When he did speak, it wasn't about morphing. I raised him up high above my head. "What is it?" "Like a forest fire? Or is it that volcano?" 73 I lowered him back down. "Maybe it's the others. Maybe they made it to shore and started a fire. I mean, there are no humans here, right?" Tobias said. I smiled. "If Marco were here he'd make some snide remark about you having plenty to eat, at least." Tobias laughed. "At least we have water as long as we stay by the river. On the other hand, what if that smoke is from Cassie and Jake? We have to go find out. Besides, the sun's going down. We could use a fire." Tobias said. "Yeah, right. Like I'm going to leave you here in the middle of nowhere, helpless." He argued with me a little. Said he'd be okay and so on. But there was no way. We decided to drink our fill from the river. Then we turned away from it toward the smoke. Already it was harder to see in the fading sunlight. The saw grass gradually gave way to shorter 74 grasses. And the forest that had been on our left the whole time receded. We were walking now across a plain that looked like something you'd expect to see lions roaming. But we were tens of millions of years away from lions. "Lions I could handle," I muttered. "Nothing. Just thinking out loud. Oh, man!" "I have to set you down for a second," I said. I laid him back on the golden, foot-high grass. I began to pick the insects off my feet. Several different species of bugs had been attracted to the cuts on my feet. Tobias cried. I shrugged. "Looks worse than it is. Besides, this grass we're in now isn't bad." He fell silent. He cocked his hawk's head left, then right. "What is it?" In addition to their amazing sense of sight, birds of prey also hear very, very well. I jumped up, grabbed him, and held him high over my head to give him the best possible view. But the 75 truth is, I could see what there was to see well enough. I almost dropped him. Four... no five creatures that looked a little like rhinoceroses. Only instead of one horn, they had two hugely long horns protruding from a thick, scalloped shell around their heads. "Even I know that dinosaur," I said. "Those are Triceratops. But they're just plant-eaters, right? Not dangerous?" Tobias agreed. I didn't ask how Tobias could size up the situation so well. Probably because he is a predator. Actually, two kinds of predator: hawk and human. The combination of hawk instincts and human intelligence gives him a lot of insight into the battle for survival. He turned his head to look behind us and let out a thought-speak moan. 76 he said. "How big do you think they are?" "Big deal. That's only about the size of a big kid or a small man." They were close enough now that I could see them, even with my sun-strained human eyes. Man-sized lizards bounding along on powerful legs. Their pebbly skin was the color of asparagus soup and coffee ice cream, swirled together. Not that I was getting really hungry or anything. A gust of wind ruffled my hair. The wind blew our scent toward the Deinonychus. I saw one of them stop, raise his head, and turn it toward us. I felt the eyes searching for me. And I swear I felt the moment when those cold, yellow eyes locked onto me. "Hroooo! Hroooo!" the dinosaur cried. They broke into a run. "Uh-oh." I grabbed Tobias and started to run, the pain in my bloody feet forgotten. Stupid. I might as well have been trying to outrun a wolf. 77 Tobias yelled. Suddenly it wasn't the big Triceratops caught in the Deinonychus's trap. It was a much, much easier prey. 78 Cassie "Faster. .. okay, more grass ., . okay, hoooof, hoooof!" I blew lightly on the dry grass. Jake moved the tendon bow back and forth as fast as he could. Marco held the top of the stick. It had taken a while for us to piece together old bits of forgotten Boy Scout lore and scenes we'd seen on TV or in movies or read about in books. But eventually we'd figured it out, starting with a flat piece of wood as a base. Ax cut a small notch in it. We then took a straight stick about a foot long. That we held upright, using pieces of bark to protect the holder's hands from the friction. We fashioned a bow by stringing a length of 79 Tyrannosaurus tendon cut from the animal's foot. We put a half loop of the bowstring around the upright stick. Then all we had to do was move the bow quickly back and forth. The vertical stick spun in the groove of the flat base piece. And slowly but surely, the heat of friction began to glow. I grabbed a tiny handful of dry grass. I bent over, my face just inches away from the base. I added a bit more grass and blew again, gently, gently. A piece of grass crisped and twisted. More air. I blew harder. More browning, twisting grass. I began to despair. "Flame!" Marco cried. It was true. A tiny flame. Very tiny. I fed more grass into it. More grass. Now the tiniest twigs. The twig caught fire! I looked up at Jake and Marco. Their faces were shining. "Wow," I whispered. "This is the first deliberately made fire. Ever. We just invented fire." Ax leaned down low to help pile larger sticks on the flame. It was mesmerizing. The flame grew and grew. It ate up the grass and moved up to the sticks. I just sat there, feeling weird and significant and yet silly. It was like a holy religious ritual. Man creating fire. 80 Or in this case, woman, I thought with a grin. Rachel will appreciate.... But no, Rachel wasn't around anymore. Marco stepped away and came back with a long stick. He'd impaled a half dozen shreds of Tyrannosaurus meat on the stick. He held them over the fire. They crackled and sizzled and smelled wonderful. I folded my legs and my awkward Tyrannosaurus sandals under me. It was starting to get dark under the trees. But we had fire. We alone, on all of planet Earth, had fire. We had moved away from the dead dinosaur just as a bunch of very tiny, swift, two-legged dinosaurs showed up looking for a late lunch. We were now camped at the edge of the plain, with the woods fifty yards away at our backs. We'd chosen the spot because there was a stream running by. And because we just didn't know which was safer: open country or woods. "Okay, who's going to be first?" Marco asked, holding out a strip of hot meat. "We have medium rare and well-done." Jake reached for the slice. He took a cautious bite. "Just don't say it tastes like chicken," Marco said. 81 Jake considered. "It tastes like fish, actually. Like a mild fish. Maybe like swordfish. It could use some salt." Marco cocked an eyebrow at me. "Now he's a food expert?" I laughed softly. I took a piece. It was delicious. But then again, I was starving. "The first cooked food in all of history," Marco observed. "Plus the first complaint about food in all of history. Ax-man, you want to grind a hoof into a piece of this? Or maybe you could morph to human and eat it?" Andalites eat by absorbing grass through their hooves as they run or walk. Ax was watching the grassy plain. He was using his stalk eyes to swivel carefully in all directions. The sky was shading from blue to brilliant red and orange, with sunset coming on quickly. A massive, distorted-looking red sun slipped below a layer of high clouds and dropped behind the volcano. "Beautiful," I said, mostly to myself. "The first person in history to appreciate a sunset," Marco said. "How much longer do you figure you'll be doing that, Marco?" Jake asked tolerantly. 82 Marco grinned. His face was red from the glow of sunset. "The first person to ever complain about someone talking too much." "What are we going to do about it getting dark?" I asked. Jake looked surprised. "I don't know. You've been so cool about all this back-to-nature stuff, I guess I was waiting for you to tell us." Was he resentful that I had been taking a more active role? No. Surely not. "I don't have any brilliant ideas." "Doesn't fire keep animals away?" Marco asked. "Not always," I said. "Not predators. In Africa, man-eating lions and leopards go right to villages, into huts and drag people away. In grasslands like this, you get lightning fires all the time. Some of the predators may have learned to let the fire drive smaller prey toward them." "The first really, really depressing example of way too much information in all of history," Marco said. "We have our weapons," I said. Jake said, "Yeah. Three sharp sticks. Plus Ax's tail. Throw in some burning torches and we can probably handle some of the smaller predators." I felt a chill and scooted closer to the fire, which now blazed up fairly well. The image of a huge T-rex looming up suddenly, gold and red 83 from the firelight, its vast mouth open, eyes greedy ... I took a couple of deep breaths. I'm not Rachel. I can't just turn off the fear. If Rachel were here, she'd say something cocky about kicking Tyrannosaurus butt. We'd all know it was just bold talk, but we'd feel better, anyway. "Okay," Jake said. "We sleep in shifts. Ax's time-tracking sense is messed up, but he can approximate two hours and wake us up. Two of us awake at all times. The people who are awake will sit facing out, away from the fire. That way their eyes will be adjusted to seeing in the dark." "Good plan," Marco said. "That way there'll be two of us to scream, 'Oh no, we're toast!' when the next Big Rex shows up." "If a predator shows up, what do we do?" I asked. Jake considered for a moment. "I think the most dangerous morph any of us has is my tiger morph. If we're attacked, I'll morph. Ax will use his tail. Cassie and Marco, you grab your weapons. The three of you try and hold off the ... the whatever shows up ... till I've morphed. An Andalite and a tiger together should be enough. Then Marco and Cassie, you two will morph. But morph something to escape, not fight." "Cassie and I, we wave sharp sticks at a Big Rex?" Marco asked skeptically. "Meanwhile, you're helpless in mid-morph." 84 "You have a better plan?" Jake asked testily. "Sure. If Big Mister T shows up, we scream and cry and blubber like babies till he eats us." Jake grinned. Then he laughed. So did I. It wasn't even slightly funny, of course, but sometimes fear and exhaustion can combine to make you giddy. "Okay, Cassie and Ax take the first watch. Marco, you and I have to try and sleep." "At least I won't have any bad dreams," Marco said. "I'm already in one." Jake and Marco fell silent. I don't know if they slept at all. I turned away from the fire and looked out into darkness that was deepening with shocking speed. Already the night was rushing toward us out of the east, pushing away the last tendrils of red sunlight. Then I saw it. Like someone had painted a brush stroke of fairy dust across the sky. "Ax," I whispered. "Is that a comet?" "Even to you? You must have seen comets up in space." "Oh. Looks close." Ax said. I was surprised. "Really? Humans thought the same thing." Darkness fell. There was no moon in the sky. The starlight never touched the grass sea around us. The firelight was puny. "Are you scared, Ax?" "Me, too." I felt the stick in my hand. I felt the fire at my back. Little, weak, defenseless Homo sapiens, I faced a night full of terrors. 86 Tobias Deinonychus. That's what they were, I was pretty sure. At least, I thought so. I couldn't remember. But learning about dinosaurs in books isn't like seeing them face-to-face. They were hunting us. Like a wolf pack. They were taking their time because we were unfamiliar prey. A strange creature that ran on two legs while carrying a big bird. Yes, we were something new. New meat. Rachel ran toward the spot where the camp-fire had been before the failing light had rendered the smoke invisible. It had seemed to be coming from the edge of the plain that opened before us. As she ran, I watched the Deinonychus 87 pack. I watched them as a professional predator myself. Was there communication between them? It sure seemed like the two bands of Deinonychus were moving in concert. It was a triangle, basically. One group behind and to the west. The second group level with us but to the east. We were running north. If we veered slightly left, we'd hit the edge of the forest. Was that the right move? "Why?" she managed to gasp. Rachel's in shape, but running barefoot while carrying a hawk is not easy. Rachel didn't say anything. But she did veer left a little. Toward the trees. I focused my hawk eyes on the westerly group. They were speeding up! A quick glance to the east. They were speeding up, too, but only after the first group did. I said. 88 The Deinonychus were running now. They were quite fast. And so close I could see details of the leader: the pebbly lizard skin, the way the tail stuck out stiff as a board for balance, the placid expression on that intelligent face. His weapons were formidable. He stood no taller than a short man or a tall boy. But his jaw could close over a human head. His hands were relatively larger and stronger than a Tyranno-saurus's, with wicked, down-curved claws. But it was the feet that were the main weapon. They were talons, not so very different from my own. But on each foot there was an upraised claw, seven, eight inches long. It reminded me of Ax's tail blade. That claw, kicked by that coiled steel leg, would slice through a car door. I said. She said nothing. Just gasped and panted. I could hear her heart pounding madly. Trees! We hit the tree line and suddenly it occurred to me just how late in the day it was. The sun was setting in a blaze of glory out on the plain, but under the trees it was already night. 89 Rachel stopped. She dropped me in the dead leaves. She bent over double, hands on her knees, throwing up from exhaustion. The predator in me was glad. Perfect. The powerful, unfamiliar scent would draw the Deinonychus right to this point. <0kay, I can't fly, but I can grip. I want you to throw me. Straight up. Up into this tree. Up to that branch.> "Wha . . . wha . . ." Besides, I added silently, you don't want to die as helpless prey. As a human, you'll simply be ripped apart. You'll be eaten alive. As a bear, they'll at least have to fight you first. Rachel stood up. Then she bent over, cramped in her right side. She winced in pain. I could see her feet were torn. She was exhausted. But not beaten yet. When she met my gaze, I still saw fierce Rachel in her blue eyes. I said. "Okay." She reached down and lifted me up. Like someone heaving a basketball from her chest, she threw me upward. Too low! I missed the branch. I flapped my wings, an instinct. A painful, searingly painful, instinct. I hit the ground. 90 "I can't do it." She grabbed me again. This time she put her whole body into it. Up! The branch. I flapped my good wing, spun in the air, grabbed. Yes. I grabbed with my second talon and held firm. She ran. At least, she hobbled and staggered away through the trees. And I waited. I waited and tried not to think of what would happen to Rachel if I messed up. My branch was just six feet above the ground. I felt totally helpless. I was a bird who could not fly. And there is nothing weaker than a bird who can't fly. I gripped my branch. Noises. Many clawed feet running. A Deinonychus appeared. Its tail was minus about a foot of length. The leader of the pack. "Heeeeessss!" He froze. He looked at the mess Rachel had left. But he did not walk under my branch. Then another Deinonychus. This one ran right over and sniffed curiously. He had a jagged scar two feet long down his back. I could see it clearly. Short-tail turned away. Scar walked beneath me. His head was just a foot below me. Now! 91 I dropped. I opened my talons. I sank them into reptilian skin, right along the old scar. "Hrroooohhh!" The Deinonychus turned his head to glare at me with one eye. He opened a mouth lined with ridiculously large teeth. I almost lost it. I had to fight the urge to flap away, broken wing and all. Focus, Tobias, I told myself. I locked the fear out of my mind. I held tight with my talons. And I focused on the dinosaur. It may have been sixty-five or seventy or eighty million years b.c., but DNA was still DNA. 92 Tobias I acquired the Deinonychus. I absorbed his DNA into me. And he grew passive and calm, like most animals do when being acquired. When I was done he wandered away, as if he'd forgotten what he'd been doing. I stood there, utterly vulnerable on the forest floor. And then I heard a roar. Not a saurian roar, but the full-throated roar of a very large mammal. Rachel! I focused my mind again. I pictured the Deinonychus in my mind. And slowly at first, then faster, the changes began. All right, Tobias, keep your mind strong! I warned myself. It was a new morph. I'd have to deal with the Deinonychus's instincts. 93 My feathers began to stiffen and harden. It was as if someone were coating them with rubber cement or something. The feather pattern remained at first, but they were glued down. And then they began to melt together. My beak began to extend, out and out, and at the same time the edges became serrated, almost like a saw. And each saw tooth grew and extended, longer and longer, to begin to form the teeth of the Deinonychus. All the while I grew. Up and up. From standing a foot tall to five times that height. My tail feathers twined and twisted together and then my tail hardened and grew. Out and out, impossibly long! Everywhere I could feel the muscles bulging and growing. Layers of muscle over thickening bones. I rose high on legs like steel springs. My talons became less graceful and more deadly. I found I could raise the huge, killing claw. Yes, that's how I would run, with that claw raised so that nothing would dull its razor-sharpness. I loved that claw. I pictured it ripping open ... no! Already the dinosaur's instincts were struggling to rise up in my own mind. But that wasn't going to happen. It couldn't happen. Rachel needed me. But the power! The vivid, electric energy in every cell of my body! 94 My eyesight grew dim. But not much worse than human eyes, and better in that they could see fairly well in the dark. My hearing diminished, but again, not by much. And to compensate for those losses, the sense of smell flooded my consciousness. What? What smell was that? I stood up and sniffed the wind. "Roooooaaarrrr!" a deep, hoarse voice bellowed. "Heeeesss! Heeeesss!" A more familiar cry. The hunt was on! The pack had cornered its prey. I had to hurry. Hurry, or all the best meat would be taken. I'd have nothing but cold carrion. With my mouth watering, I bounded away, tearing through the underbrush to join the pack. 95 J. woke up. It was dark. I was all hot on the side near the fire and cold on the other side. I heard the gurgling of the stream. I'd been dreaming of home. In my dream I was eating dinosaur-shaped cereal at the breakfast table with my parents. I didn't want to think about my parents. What they would be going through worrying about me just made me sick to my stomach. "Have you seen anything?" "Yaaahhh!" Cassie yelped. Then, "Good grief, you scared me." Marco moaned in his sleep. I rubbed my eyes. I could not believe I had 96 actually fallen asleep. But obviously I had. "Ax, how are you doing?" "How long was I asleep?" Approximately one of the current hours and fifty-two minutes.> He came close and tossed another piece of wood on the fire. I stretched out my foot and poked Marco. He moaned again. Then he sat up. "Oh. So it wasn't a dream. Too bad." "Cassie, you and Ax can -" I stopped. I had looked up at the sky. "What is that?" "It's a comet," Cassie said. "Isn't it absolutely beautiful?" "Yeah. Looks awfully close." I gazed up at the sweep of bright dust trailing from the brilliant head. I glanced over at Ax. He was outlined against the stars, a dark shadow with stalk eyes turning restlessly. "It's not going to hit us or anything, is it?" I laughed when I said it. "Well, that's a relief," Marco said. "I wouldn't want to get killed by a comet and cheat the dinosaurs out of eating me." "You two get some sleep," I said to Ax and Cassie. "Marco and I will take over. But actually, first I have to ... urn ... I have to take a little walk." I left the cozy glow of the fire and headed into darkness. Twenty feet, and the fire already seemed like part of some different world. It was so dark. I looked back and it was as if the fire and the comet were both floating in the same empty space. I did what I had to do, then I saw it. A flash! A sudden flash of light. Low on the horizon to the north. Was it a meteorite? A falling star? No. There it was again. Faint. A tiny stab of red light. Again. Again. I hurried back to the others. "Look to the north. Do you guys -" A flash like the sun exploding! High overhead. The flash lit up the entire landscape for just 98 an instant. But in that instant I saw them: a herd of vast creatures. They stood on four tree-trunk legs. They had tremendously long necks and tails that were just as long. It was impossible to know their actual size, but they had to stand at least four or five times my own height. And from head to tail they had to be forty feet. I'd seen at least ten of them moving toward us along the line of the stream. And in that same flash of light, the huge dinosaurs had seen something, too. Coming up behind them, on their trail, like a monster in the night, a Tyrannosaurus. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! The big dinosaurs bolted, breaking into a panicked run. Straight for our camp! "What was that flash?" Cassie cried as I ran for the fire. "Everybody run!" I yelled. "It's a stampede." "Stampede? What is this, a cowboy movie?!" Marco demanded incredulously. "MOVE!" Boom! Boom! Boom! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! It was like the worst thunderstorm in history. Creatures five times the size of elephants were stampeding. Every step of those big feet was like a pile driver. "Get across the stream!" I yelled. "Where is it?" 99 "What stream?" "Just follow me." I ran, making sure Cassie and Marco were keeping up. Ax, I didn't have to worry about. He was far faster than any of us. The thunder grew louder. All around us. I saw a vast bulk beside me, blocking out the stars. The panicked herd was all around us. "HRRRROOOOOAAAARRRR!" My knees turned to jelly. I tripped. I hit hard. The wind was knocked out of me. A massive, taloned foot landed inches from my head. I rolled. I slammed into a tree trunk. No, the leg of the long-necked dinosaur. "ScreeeEEEEE!" the terrified animal cried as the Tyrannosaurus bent low. I saw teeth glittering in moonlight. I saw a glowing yellow eye. I heard the chomp of the Tyrannosaurus's jaws as they clamped down. I was beneath the long-necked dinosaur as it fought. If I'd stood up and stretched, I would have just reached its belly. Tree-trunk legs pounded around me in a frenzy. And all the while the two animals roared and screamed and bellowed in terror and rage. I covered my ears and screamed. A battle of giants right above me. I couldn't see anything but darkness blotting out stars and the faintest outline of a creature the size of a whale. 100 I was a cockroach being hunted with sledgehammers. The ground jumped and slammed into me with each impact. I couldn't even see the legs scuffling and pounding. At any second one would crush me. I curled up in a ball and tucked my head down and shook. What morph did I have to fight these titans? Nothing. This wasn't my world. I was nothing in this world. All my powerful morphs were nothing in this world. "ScreeeEEEEEE-uh. ScreeeEEEEE-uh!" "Huh-huh-RoooAAAARRRR!" A final cry of the big dinosaur ended in a gasp and a collapsing rattle. The Tyrannosaurus had won. The long-necked dinosaur was done for. Nothing left but for him to fall. Nothing left but for him to drop down onto me. 101 Rachel They were around me. All around me. Maybe ten of them. Deinonychus, Tobias had called them. Like wolves. They circled me like wolves. They were not big, certainly smaller than my grizzly bear morph. Maybe ten feet from half-grinning mouth to rigid tail. But they were dangerous. Even with my dim grizzly bear eyesight, I could see their bristling weapons. The scythe-clawed hands; the huge ripping talon; the razor-sharp teeth. I had weapons of my own. I had strength enough in my arms and shoulders to push over a Toyota. I had my own evil, ripping claws. I had teeth. But I was not fooled. I knew my only hope 102 was that the Deinonychus would be discouraged by the fact that I was unknown prey. Maybe the pack could be scared off. Maybe they wouldn't like the smell of bear. I wondered if Tobias was safe up in his tree. I hoped so. The leader, the Deinonychus with the shortened tail, stepped to the front. "HhhooorrRAAWWWRR!" I roared, and rose up erect to my impressive seven-plus feet. In my own time, there was no land predator as large or with as much raw power as a grizzly. But this was a whole different time. And a way, way different standard of large. I knew these Deinonychus shared an environment with Tyrannosaurus and probably a dozen other very big, very dangerous lizards. And they thrived in that environment. How was I ever going to scare them? The leader cocked his head and listened to me roar. He looked directly at me, considering, wondering. Then two of them leaped! "RROOAAARRR!" I bellowed. I swung my meat-hook claw with all my might. It was a lucky blow. I caught the closest Deinonychus across the neck. He collapsed. With no signal that I could see, they all backed away. The leader sniffed at me. He 103 sniffed at his comrade, who was no longer moving. Intelligent eyes considered. This time I heard a signal. It was almost the cheeping of a songbird. "Neep!" The Deinonychus pack circled around. It was so precise. So planned, almost rehearsed. They were not running away. They were not giving up. Instead they were preparing a more concerted attack. They were prepared to take losses. That meant they would press the attack this time. Press the attack till I was down. Till I was food. But something wasn't right. I could see it in the leader's eyes. He was glaring hard at a Deinonychus that had just arrived. This new dinosaur stepped forward. He sniffed at me from a safe distance. And then, without warning, he leaped! A slash with his left foot claw ripped a two-foot-long slice in my chest. It hadn't cut deep into vital organs but it hurt. "HhhhRROOOAAARRR!" I bellowed. But there was an even louder roar. The leader of the pack screamed at the impertinent new dinosaur. The new Deinonychus jumped back, away from me, and spun around to face the enraged pack leader. The two Deinonychus stood bristling, face-to- 104 face. A challenge! That was it. The new Deinony-chus had ignored the leader. He'd attacked on his own. And that was an attack on the leader's dominance. The leader hissed. It was a low, sinister sound. He stuck his tail straight back. The challenger raised his clawed hands, ready for battle. And it was only then that I spotted the twisted pieces of fabric around the challenger's arm. Fabric torn from my own leotard and wrapped around Tobias's splint. I cried. It was Tobias. It had to be. But he had ripped a hole in me .... I realized what had happened. Tobias had somehow acquired this Deinonychus's DNA and morphed him. But in doing so he'd lost control. The Deinonychus's instincts had pushed Tobias's mind aside and taken control. And now Tobias was in a showdown with the pack leader. A showdown to determine who would be boss. And who would be in charge of destroying me. Tobias and the leader circled each other slowly, warily. The pack leader leaped! He landed, deadly feet out, mouth snapping, right where Tobias had 105 been a split second before. But Tobias had dodged left, then crouched low to get in under the leader's guard. Chomp! "ScrrEEEEE!" The leader jumped back, shocked. A piece of his left flank was missing. Tobias circled again, tail stiff as a pole behind him. Now the leader was more cautious. He waited for Tobias to make the first move. It wasn't a long wait. Tobias charged. With split-second timing, the other dinosaur jumped up in the air. He met Tobias's face with his own wicked talons. Slash! "ScrrrEEEE-uh!" Tobias fell back. Blood gushed from a wound in his face. The pack leader pressed the attack. Tobias stumbled back in seeming panic. "Hrrooo-HAH!" A cry of triumph came from the pack leader. He leaped. Too soon! Tobias was under him, ripping upward with his forepaws. He jammed his claws into the other Deinonychus's chest. The pack leader screamed and flailed. But he could not tear Tobias's teeth away from him. It was over. Tobias stood up. And he screeched a loud cry of challenge. 106 "Hreee-YAH! Hreee-hrEEEE-YAH!" He looked at the rest of the pack. They looked at their fallen leader. Then they looked at Tobias. And one by one, like vanquished knights offering their swords to the victor, they each lowered their noses to the ground in submission. Tobias turned. Turned to look at me. I was using one paw to hold my own wound closed. The pain was intense. But the fear was greater. I saw the look in Tobias's eyes. He advanced toward me. He was hungry. The others advanced just a step behind him. No, I realized. No, that was wrong, wasn't it? His deadly jaw was inches away. He stopped. He tilted his head. And suddenly, his entire body seemed to shudder. he said. 107 Jacke Down it came. Like having the Goodyear blimp dropped on top of you. Only much, much heavier. I couldn't see a thing, only feel the air rush aside as the beast fell. I rolled. WHUUUUUMP! "Aaaahhh!" I cried. I was pinned. My legs were caught beneath the long-necked dinosaur's belly. Just my lower legs, and nothing had been broken, but when I tried to move I realized I was trapped. "Jake!" Cassie cried. "Where are you?" I wanted to tell her to shut up and save herself. Another part of me wanted to beg her to help me. 108 I was shaking. Literally shaking. Like I had fever chills and I just couldn't stop them. CHOMP! The huge head came down and ripped violently into the long-necked dinosaur. CHOMP! The Tyrannosaurus was eating ravenously. Just a couple of feet above my head. Then I guess it chomped into something tough, because it yanked. And that yanking lifted the big dinosaur's weight off me for a second. I was out! I rolled. I jumped to my feet. "Ooof!" I went down. My legs had gone numb from being pinned. I could move them, but - Down it came! Flashing teeth all around me. No way out. I curled into a ball. "Oh, God!" I cried. The Tyrannosaurus's jaw closed around me. I clenched my arms and legs tight together. Still those teeth cut grooves in my left shoulder. No room! The mouth was too narrow. I pushed my numb legs out before me, down the Tyrannosaurus's throat. I was in the Tyrannosaurus's mouth. No room to move. Stinking foul air. Sticky saliva all over me. A big tongue that tried to push the rest of me down the waiting, greedy throat. He closed his mouth and crushed the air out of my lungs. 109 I grabbed that tongue. I locked my fingers on the rough, wet thing and focused with all that was left of my terrified, jibbering brain. I wasn't even sure I'd acquired the DNA when I started trying to morph. I was doing it all at once. I was acquiring and morphing and screaming in terror. But I began to grow. I couldn't be near those teeth when I grew. They would lacerate me. I wormed down the roaring Tyrannosaurus's throat. Down away from the teeth. Its powerful throat muscles were pummel ing my legs now, but I was morphing. The Tyrannosaurus realized something was wrong. It had swallowed the wrong thing. It coughed and gacked. Then, a massive surge of muscle spasm, and I was falling. Flump! I hit the soft side of the fallen long-necked dinosaur. I tried to grab on, but failed. My hands weren't my hands anymore. I rolled onto the ground at the Tyrannosaurus's feet. I was at his mercy. Utterly. But the big monster was not able to attack. Something had happened to its insides. I don't know if I ruptured something, or what. But the tyrant lizard stomped three, four, five steps away and collapsed. It sat down on its tail, then fell over onto its side, moaning. 110 I lay there gasping, not knowing what body I had, not caring. I was alive. I tried my mouth. No, I couldn't talk. I demorphed. Then tried again. "Cassie! Marco! Ax!" "Jake?" Cassie's voice cried in the darkness. It took a few seconds for us to find each other back at the glowing embers of the campfire. Cassie put her arms around me, slime and all, and hugged me. I was too shaky to return the hug, but it felt good. "Is it dead?" Marco asked. "No," I said. "But I think I hurt it. It's on its side over there, I think." "You know what we should do," Marco said grimly. "We should all acquire that Tyrannosau-rus. We need one alive to acquire. It's alive. Until we acquire a Big Rex we're just going to get chased around till sooner or later we get eaten." "I already did it," I said. "But you're right." None of them were anxious to walk over and start touching that creature. Even moaning on its side, it was terrifying. We came up slowly, carefully, tentatively beneath the tail. We earned small torches to light our way. Marco was the first. He pressed his hand against the crocodilelike flesh. And then Ax. And lastly Cassie. 111 It was strange. Like some kind of ritual. Three humans and an alien, all carrying torches that might as well have been cinders in the endless darkness. We cowered before the groaning, wheezing monster and touched it. "It's so strange," Cassie said. "We're humans in a time millions of years before the first humans. In our time, Homo sapiens run the planet. In this time it's the Tyrannosaurus. You always wonder who would have won, if humans and dinosaurs had lived at the same time. Who would have survived?" "They would have hunted us like cats hunt mice," Marco said. "Primitive humans with sharp sticks and maybe a couple of torches? No contest." Ax said. Not for the first time, I wondered if Ax had developed a sense of humor. And then the adrenalin and lack of sleep and the physical beating all came together. My eyes closed all on their own. My legs buckled. I fell, and arms reached out to take me. 112 Marco After we let Jake sort of doze for awhile, we decided that maybe sleeping between a dead long-necked dinosaur the size of Nebraska and a moaning, sick Tyrannosaurus was not a great idea. So despite the fact that it was so dark we couldn't see our own feet, we trudged on. At least it wasn't raining. After that big huge flash, I'd assumed rain was coming. But maybe that's not the way it worked in this millennium. "So basically everything is fine," I said, shifting my pathetically dim torch to my other hand. "We're tens of millions of years in the past. We have no food except charred scraps of dinosaur-on-a-stick. There's a river over there, but if we do go and get a drink, some monster crocodile will 113 jump out and chomp us. We're lost, which is fine because let's face it, we're not exactly looking for the nearest Taco Bell, so who cares where we are? Plus, just to make things perfect, we're wearing Tyrannosaurus skin sandals, which is going to really, really endear us to the next Big Rex we see." "I wish Rachel were here," Cassie said. "Yeah," I said, suddenly sad. "She'd say something like, 'I can stand the dinosaurs, Marco, I just can't stand listening to you whine.'" Jake laughed softly. "You do a pretty good Rachel impression." I heard Cassie sniffle. "You know what occurs to me," I said. "We survived, right? I mean, twice we've been jumped by tyrannosaurs or tyrannosauri, whichever. I'm still here and I'm not Captain Heroic. And Jake is still here, despite the fact he's a big, galumphing, clumsy oaf, and not even all that bright." "Thanks," Jake said. "My point is, if we could survive, are you going to tell me Rachel and Tobias - Xena, Warrior Princess, and a Bird-boy who has to hunt his breakfast every morning - didn't make it? Come on, anything that wants to kill Rachel would have to be meaner than Rachel. And you know that's not even possible." Cassie chuckled. She sniffled, too. The truth 114 was I was talking total bull, but who knew? Maybe somehow Rachel and Tobias really did make it. It was easier to believe they did. I've always said you make a choice in this world. You can see the world as being tragic, or you can see it as being funny. Some things just flat-out aren't funny, of course. But with very few exceptions, you can usually find the humor in life and in people. I guess if you want to see the world as being sad, terrible, unfair, boo-hoo boo-hoo, that's fine. But man, what kind of life is that? We trudged. We stopped and dozed. We got up and trudged some more. And gradually that humongous comet in the sky grew faint as the sky began to light up with the rising sun. Then with shocking suddenness, pop! The sun just seemed to jump up off the horizon. I tossed away my charred stump of a torch, closed my eyes, and spread my arms wide to welcome good old Mommy Sun. It illuminated a scene out of some museum diorama. The plain stretched out before us, punctuated now with clumps of trees and sudden jutting rocks. The stream still wandered beside us. The woods were off to one side. The volcano was still smoking away, looking intimidating as it towered up above the plain. And scattered about on that African-looking 115 savanna, where you might expect to see gazelles or wildebeest or lions, there was a small herd of Triceratops. They moved along calmly, maybe a hundred of them. Like an old-west buffalo herd, I guess. Only Buffalo Bill would have hung up his hat rather than go after these bad boys. Ax asked. "Yeah. Unless it's a school day," I said. "Plus it blanks out that comet, and that thing was starting to bug me. On the other hand, I'm looking at a bunch of dinosaurs the size of cement trucks, so -" "Lightning. So what?" It took me about five more steps before I said, "What?" I stopped. Jake stopped. Cassie stopped. "Artificial?" Jake asked. "What do you mean, artificial? Doesn't that mean man-made? Or at least, made?" "Just tell us what it was!" Cassie yelled impatiently. That shocked us all. Cassie never yells. But then again, maybe she's just not a morning person. Jake took a deep breath. "Ax? Do me a favor. Don't assume we know these things, okay?" he said. Jake looked at me. "You think Yeerks got transported back to this time with us somehow?" "Don't call me prince," Jake said automatically. "There weren't any Yeerks anywhere near that submarine when it blew up," I said. "Especially not any Yeerk spacecraft. I mean, come on, I think we'd have noticed." Ax said. "Highly advanced dinosaurs?" I said. "Professor T-rex? I don't think so." 117 "Last night I saw some weird flashes far off," Jake said. "Me, too," Cassie said. "I assumed they were lightning or something." We resumed walking. "Ax-man, I think maybe you're just nuts." Ax said dubiously. He droned on for a while about the wavelengths and the retinal impact patterns and distance-sense and a lot of other Andalite stuff that humans would probably learn about someday. I tuned it out. I was watching the Triceratops herd, which was off to our side now. I mean, come on, every little kid has a toy plastic Triceratops at some time. And here they were. Real. Actual dinosaurs moving along, munching the grass, occasionally using their huge long horns to dig up a tasty herb. It was cool. Set aside the fact that we had taken a big elevator ride about ten floors down on the food chain. It was still cool. "Oh, man, look. I think we're coming up on some kind of big gorge or whatever," Jake said. The prairie before us did seem to stop suddenly. The grass wasn't waving beyond a certain point. 118 "We'll have to go around," Cassie said. "Why?" I wondered. "Where exactly is it we think we're going?" "What do you want us to do?" Jake asked peevishly. "Sit down right here and start building a new civilization?" "I'm just saying it's not like we have an appointment to be somewhere." We marched on, unable to see the extent of the rift till we got close. And then suddenly we could see. It was incredible. Like walking up on the Grand Canyon the first time. We were at the edge of a valley hundreds of feet deep and miles across. It gave me vertigo just standing there, like I might fall in. And it would be a very long fall, with plenty of time to scream on the way down. But that wasn't what really knocked the wind out of us. Because see, the valley wasn't empty. Down there, spread across a mile of valley floor, were glittering, shining buildings. Buildings. And hovering protectively above those buildings was something that looked an awful lot like a flying saucer. 119 Tobias How's the wing?" Rachel asked. "They hurt all over again." "Nope. Not like you hurt my stomach when you opened me up like you were gutting a fish." "I know. I'm cranky. I didn't exactly have a good night's sleep. I seem to remember having to morph the grizzly bear, only to have you come along and slice me up like I was a pepperoni pizza. Slice me up like I was a hunk of cheese." I sighed. I tried to balance on Rachel's shoulder without digging my talons in. We'd ripped a 120 patch of the dead Deinonychus's skin to cover her shoulder, but it wasn't staying on. "Sliced me up like I was a ham," Rachel muttered. "Like I was bacon. And eggs. And some hash browns. Denny's. I'd give up shopping for a Denny's Grand Slam breakfast right now. The one with the pancakes. Get the hash browns as a side order. Two sausage links, two slices of bacon, two eggs over medium, you know? Not too soft and runny. I don't like them soft and runny. Maple syrup on the pancakes. Has to be maple. What kind of person puts boysenberry syrup on pancakes?" She turned her icy blue eyes toward me. "Like a loaf of bread. That's how you sliced me up. Like a loaf of bread you get fresh from the bakery, all crusty and crispy and golden on the outside and soft and white and still-warm inside. And raspberry preserves. Has to be raspberry. I like Smuckers. A big jar of raspberry preserves with the seeds. I mean, what kind of baby has to have seedless preserves?" I looked at her with my hawk's eyes. I was inches away. It was like looking at her through a microscope, practically. She hadn't slept, hadn't brushed her hair, and she was in a bad mood. But she looked great. I looked away. What was the point? Jeez, my 121 own tiredness and hunger must be affecting me. I was starving. I could see little shrewlike mammals flitting between tree roots and cowering beneath ferns, but with a busted wing there was nothing I could do. All I could do was watch the trees as we walked. We had left the Deinonychus pack behind in the night. As leader of the pack, I'd snarled at them till they backed away. I left them looking lost and stupid. But pretty soon they'd get around to choosing a new leader. Rachel had acquired one of them. It hadn't been easy, but I'd been able to control the murderous creature long enough for her to touch him. Now we were wandering along in the forest. Looking for food. Looking for Jake and the others. Looking for a clue of what to do. We were entering an area with more vegetation now. There were clusters of palm trees here and there. Clumps of five or ten trees with some bushes around the base. It made me nervous. They blocked my view. On the other hand .... "Not according to my mom. She's thinking about dating again. You know, it's been awhile since the divorce and ... oh. You mean like dates you eat? I guess they grow on trees." 122 <0n date palms, right?> "Like I know? Like I go food shopping out in the wild? Picking dates off trees and tomatoes off vines and corn out of, I don't know, corn trees?" "Oh, fine. I'm starving and you're picking on me because I'm not a farm girl like Cassie." "I could use a rest. And some shade." We headed toward the second nearest clump of trees. Two monstrously big Triceratops were over in the shade of the nearest trees. Supposedly they were peaceful plant-eaters. But they were big as elephants, with three-foot-long horns. So no matter how peaceful they were, I didn't want to share the shade with them. I said. I could see pods of some sort clustered under the fanlike fronds. We reached the shade of the tree. Rachel set me down on the ground and threw rocks till she knocked a pod down. It was brown, about the size of a coconut. She used another rock to bash it open. Inside was a whitish pulp. "Well? What do you think?" Rachel made a face. She held a piece of the 123 pulp up to her nose. "Smells okay." Then she shrugged, popped some in her mouth and swallowed. "Hmm. Not bad." I asked. I gazed up jealously at the fruit. I was low down on the ground, not able to see much but the towering trees. But something caught my eye. Through the smooth trunks and riotous bushes, I saw something curved. It looked ridiculously like a handheld fan. Only much bigger. There were spines or spokes with brightly-patterned green and red fabric between them. No, not fabric. Skin. But it had to be from something dead. It wasn't moving. Totally still. The fan had moved. Rachel froze. "Please don't tell me it's another of your dinosaurs." Rachel reached down to lift me up. "What is it?" We backed away, keeping our eyes firmly fixed on the spotted fan or sail. But as we backed away I realized Rachel's shoulder was getting tougher to hold on to. 124 "I'm morphing," she said. "I'm hungry, you're hungry. Maybe we can take this guy down and have a nice big dinosaur breakfast." "I'm morphing that dannynockorus." She couldn't answer. Her tongue was no longer human. Her skin was pebbly and rough. Her shoulder sloped downward and I jumped off to land in the grass. I wasn't exactly happy with Rachel at that point. But at the same time, I wondered if maybe she was right. We had the Deinonychus morph. Why not use it? I began to morph myself. Great, it would mean resetting my splint yet again. This was no way to heal. Then again, starving wasn't all that good for your health, either. The breeze shifted. The skin and bone sail moved. It moved to catch the breeze. Why? I should know. There was some fact hiding just in the back of my head. What was I forgetting? I pictured my toy dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus rex, Brachiosaurus, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Spinosaurus. Spinosaurus? Big sail on its back. What about it? What was it like? What did it do? Was it an herbivore? 125 Moving! CRASH! CRASH! Crrrrr-UNCH! Up rose the sail as the Spinosaurus stood up. Crash went the bushes as it swiveled to look at us. Crunch went a tree trunk as it thrust its head through the trees to get a closer look at us. The head was bigger than Rachel. She was just completing her Deinonychus morph. Would she be able to control the dinosaur's active instincts? She was more experienced at morphing than I was. The Spinosaurus glared at us. Or at Rachel, at least. she said. <0h.> The Spinosaurus rose up to its full standing height, looming up huge behind the trees. The curved sail on its back was more than five feet high. Tail to nose it was fifty feet long. It stood on two legs - smaller and weaker legs than a Tyran-nosaurus, but plenty to move with. The Spinosaurus was silent. It just stared as two Deinonychus emerged from a girl and a bird. That would be Rachel, of course. I'd never say 126 anything so stupid. <0ne is plenty!> <0kay. Then let's run away.> We turned. We ran. We ran right into the Spinosaurus's mate. 127 Rachel What could I do? I had to attack. The Deinonychus body was surging with power and deadly energy. Then again, the Spinosaurus was way, way too big. To give you some idea, if we'd both been dogs, the Spinosaurus would be a German shepherd and I'd be a Chihuahua. No choice. No way around the second Spinosaurus. I yelled. I leaped. The steel spring legs lifted me off the ground and I flew through the air, deadly raking claws outward. I was aiming for the Spin-osaurus's exposed belly. 128 SLASH! With my oversized talons. Two bright red lines in the Spinosaurus's belly! Two little lines that looked like something the Spinosaurus might put a Band-Aid on. The Spin-osaurus looked puzzled. And then it looked annoyed. It ruffled its weird sail back and opened its jaws and looked at me like I had "Oscar Mayer" printed on my back. <0kay, forget attack. We go back to plan "B." Run\> And that's when I noticed the other creature step smoothly out from the bushes. It walked on two legs. It was rough-textured, like it had really chapped skin. It was reddish in color. It had two big eyes and a small mouth, all of the same reddish-rust hue. It stood about eight feet tall. It was carrying a weapon. It was not a dinosaur. The creature raised the weapon and pointed it at the wounded and angry Spinosaurus. I saw no flash. Heard no explosion. But the Spinosaurus fell over. Like a redwood falling in the forest, it fell over. WHAM MM! The second Spinosaurus processed this and decided to go back to sleep. Tobias and I stared at the rough-textured creature with the gun. > 129 Tobias said. The creature gazed curiously at us with what seemed to be eyes, although they were mere indentations in its face. From its head a pair of antennae, flexible as whips, grew and began waving toward us. Satisfied after a few seconds of this, the antennae were retracted. "You may not kill those creatures. There are very few left. They are ours. All creatures are ours. All things are ours. What are you?" it asked in a rough, raspy, buzzing voice. It was speaking English. Now, on Star Trek you see aliens speak English all the time. Like that would be normal. But in real life when you encounter an alien speaking English, it's just weird. You figure at the very least they should be speaking Russian or Japanese or something. "Answer." I said, feeling fairly idiotic. "You speak now without making sound. Explain." I said. 130 "We hear while you are talking. Listening long time. Since night." I asked Tobias. "Change to your other form." Tobias demanded. "We are the Nesk. This is our planet. Change to your other form." I said. "This weapon can cause creatures to become unconscious. This happened to the great beast you were attacking. But it can also cause death. Change into your other forms. Or I will cause your death." The Nesk raised the weapon and pointed it at us. Now, maybe I have to back down before a fifty-foot-long Spinosaurus. But I've faced plenty of pushy aliens with ray guns. I knew this Nesk character with the ego problem would expect me to charge him, like a 131 dinosaur. But I'm a human. Better yet, I'm a gymnast. So, just like on the balance beam, I spun on one leg and whipped my rigid tail into the Nesk. My tail hit hard. It slammed into the Nesk at his chest level. My tail broke him in two. The top half simply fell off. Like I'd chopped through a tree. <0h, my God!> I cried, horrified. I'd only intended to knock him down. But then my horror changed tone. The severed lower body seemed to be dissolving. Breaking into thousands and tens of thousands of tiny squirming pieces! And the fallen upper body was still holding the weapon. Raising it toward me again! No time for pity. I lunged, mouth wide-open. I bit down on that raised hand. It dissolved. Crumbled. I felt a squirming in my mouth. Then stinging, burning. I spit out the gun. It hit the dirt. And a wave made up of the Nesk's body parts raced to reach it. My mouth was still alive with stinging and burning. The tiny reddish body parts began to crawl out of my jaw, up onto my muzzle. Up where my eyes could see them clearly. Then I remembered that smell. The acrid 132 smell of a tunnel, the stink of deadly automatons racing to tear me apart. Ants! The Nesk was made up of millions and millions of ants. 133 Cassie Okay, those buildings were not built by dinosaurs," Marco said. Jake looked at Ax. "Ax? Do you have any idea what is going on here?" Ax looked as puzzled as he was capable of looking. "Ax, at this point humans aren't even a gleam in some tiny mammal's eye. We're a long, long way from seeing the first primate. Let alone an actual human. Could they be Andalites?" Ax said. "A simple 'no' would do," Marco interrupted. "The Pemalites?" I suggested. We knew of the Pemalites from Erek. Erek looked and acted like a normal kid, but he was actually an android- a Chee - built by the extinct race called Pemalites. Marco shook his head. "Erek told us when they arrived on Earth, the last Pemalites were dying. The Chee joined their essence or whatever with wolves. There aren't any wolves. We're probably tens of millions of years away from wolves, too." "So who is hanging around on Earth in this era who can build cities and flying saucers?" Jake asked impatiently. "Why don't I go ask them?" I said, pointing to the small city in the valley. "Or at least go check them out. My osprey morph would be perfect. There are birds in this era, so I shouldn't be too obvious." Jake nodded. "Okay. That's what we'll do. We'll all go. But this just gets weirder and weirder." "You know, only one of us has to go," I - 135 suggested. "Why don't I do it? You guys can all stay here for now." Jake cocked an eyebrow. "What are you talking about?" "Well, shouldn't we take the absolute minimum risk?" Jake shook his head and kept looking at me like he couldn't figure me out. "Look, we've already lost Rachel and Tobias," I blurted. "I lost my best friend. I don't want to lose . . . you know. Anyone else." Marco looked like he was right on the verge of making a wisecrack. But he stopped. Still, I guess he just couldn't totally restrain himself, so he said, "Why don't I go with Cassie? Somehow I don't think it's me she's worried about losing." He gave Jake a sidelong smirk. Jake rolled his eyes. "We are not going to lose anyone, okay? It's probably safer for us all to be in the air together. Here on the ground we have Big Rex to worry about." It made sense. But it didn't make me feel any better. It had been just twenty-four hours since I'd last seen Rachel. I hadn't had all that much time to think about her. I'd been busy staying alive. And I guess the truth is, I almost didn't want to think about her really being gone. But last night, in that terrible black chaos, blind, unable to tell where Jake's terrified cries 136 were coming from, I just kept thinking, No, it can't happen again. I can't lose Jake, too. Now here we were, staring down at what might be our only salvation in this dangerous world. But I was more worried than before. Maybe I trust animals more than civilization. "Okay," I said. "But I get a bad feeling about this. See, this can't be right. There can't be a city down there. It doesn't make sense. There are no cities in the age of dinosaurs. And no flying saucers, either. I know we have to check it out, but we need to be careful." I began to focus on my osprey morph. An os-prey is a type of hawk that normally lives by water and eats fish. Gray feather patterns began to appear on my skin. I saw my bare feet become talons, my arms twist into wing shapes. It was a morph I had done many times before. But it was a morph from a different world. This was a world where true birds seemed to be small in number. There was a nice breeze blowing. And I could guess that there would be excellent thermals - warm updrafts - welling up from the steep valley walls. Jake asked. Marco yelled. Half a dozen small dinosaurs, each standing 137 on two legs and no more than three feet high, goggled at us with huge yellow eyes. Jake said. The dinosaurs attacked at a run. A very fast run. Marco said as we flapped into the breeze and raced along on our talons. I reached the edge of the cliff. I opened my wings and sprang out into the void. The tiny dinosaurs stopped at the edge and watched us go. Ax said. I pointed out. Ax asked, puzzled. Marco said. <"Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they're the modern stone age family."> I'd been right about the thermals. It felt good to be floating on a warm breeze. I know this seems crazy, but I somehow felt more at home in the os-prey morph than my own human body. Humans just seemed so totally out of place in this era. 138 We flew toward the shining city in the valley. With osprey eyes I could see much more clearly. I saw buildings that rose in steep, smooth sweeps, like they'd grown from the bedrock. Windows were stuck in odd locations, some aiming out, others more like skylights. And there were fields planted with green and arranged in neat circles instead of rows. <"From the town of Bedrock, they're a page right out of histo-ree,"> Marco sang. As we got closer, I could see creatures of some sort. They looked a little like large - very large - crabs. Only with shells in a wild array of colors, deep blue, spring green, orange. And while on one side there was something very much like a large pincer, on the other side there was a pair of hands. Ax volunteered. Marco said. WHAM! Something hit me! I was tumbling through the air. I fell ten feet, opened my wings again and veered into a breeze. I caught air. Nothing broken. I cried. Jake yelled. I turned my head just in time to see it fill my 139 entire field of vision. Like some monstrous bat. Green-and-yellow leather wings twenty feet across. An impossibly long, bony head. I said. Ax said tersely. They were dropping from caves in the valley wall. Three, four, six of them. They opened their wide leather wings and swooped toward us. 140 To bias They swarmed toward Rachel. Millions of ants. And a group of them was already reforming around the weapon, forming a sort of hand to raise it high and aim it. I had a very low-tech idea of how to deal with that. I leaped. I landed with both feet on the ants around the weapon. And I began to stomp. I stomped like mad with my Deinonychus feet. They weren't great feet for stomping because they were basically built like bird feet. But they were fast. I was stomping at a rate of several stomps per second. And whatever kind of super-alien ants these might be, they couldn't stand some man-sized dinosaur stomping on them. The Nesk broke and ran. I roared in triumph 141 and turned to Rachel. She was avidly licking the ants off her with her long tongue. I said. Rachel said. Ch-ch-ch-CHEEEEEW! Ch-ch-ch-CHEEEEEW! Ch-ch-ch-CHEEEEEW! The ground beside me exploded, like it had been ripped by an invisible plow. I jumped. Another plow mark just behind me! I saw movement. And there, racing toward us across the plain, was a gleaming, silver craft. Maybe twice the size of a Bug fighter, but shaped like an elongated pyramid, long end forward. Ch-ch-ch-CHEEEEEW! Ch-ch-ch-CHEEEEEW! Ch-ch-ch-CHEEEEEW! The ship fired again and blew two more five-foot-long furrows in the ground. Rachel said. I agreed. 142 We ran. Deinonychus can run when it wants to. Very fast. Maybe twenty miles an hour. Too bad the silver pyramid was about a thousand times faster. But it hesitated. I glanced back and saw it pause over the spot where we'd been. A sort of tube with a scoop on the end lowered to the ground. And I swear it vacuumed up the ants we'd scattered. It came after us again. We dodged and the craft fired, ripping tear after tear in the ground around us. I yelled. Rachel said. <0r else they're herding us,> Rachel said grimly. Directly ahead of us was a small herd of Triceratops. Of course, small only referred to the number of animals in the herd. Each one was the size of an elephant. I said. I didn't have time to explain. We reached the Triceratops. One huge bull swung his three-foot-long horns toward us in challenge. I sidestepped 143 him and leaped onto the back of an equally big but less alert female. I leaped! Soared through the air, coiled my legs, timed it just right to slam my legs down on the Triceratops's back, bounced off her, and hurtled another ten feet in the air. From up there I could see the trap. Then I was fall ing. WHUMPF! I hit, rolled, jumped up and yelled, <0n the count of three, we dodge left and keep going no matter what. One . . . two . . .> Rachel yelled. We hauled left. Ch-ch-ch-CHEEWWW! Explosions of earth and rock cut across our path but I didn't care. I'd seen what was up ahead. This was better. We raced, panting and gasping, toward what looked to us like the end of the world. A sudden gap. An emptiness. I asked. 144 Rachel yelled. I said and leaped into emptiness. Rachel was three seconds behind me. It might have been a five foot drop. It might have been ten feet. Unfortunately, it was about five hundred feet. I cried. Rachel agreed. Falling, falling, spinning out of control, no time to morph. I was going to die. I would be slammed against the ground far below and die. But even as I spun crying through the air, I swear I saw bright buildings. And then, much closer, a bird. A very familiar bird. Back in my own world I have to watch out for peregrine falcons. See, every now and then one of them will actually take a shot at a hawk. It was like some insane joke. Like fate was trying to get a good laugh at me. Dinosaurs, aliens, and now my old nemesis, a peregrine falcon. Then I saw the other set of wings. The twenty-five-foot-wide wings and bony chisel-head of a creature no human had ever seen before. Pteranodon! I thought. / used to play with you. 145 Jake The flying dinosaurs were above us. That was the problem. We were more maneuverable, but they had the altitude. And slowly but surely, by circling above us, they were forcing us down and down. Down toward the glimmering city below us. I looked in every direction. How to get away? How to get out from under this trap? The silver flying saucer was now only twenty feet below us, the highest spires of the alien city just another thirty feet lower than that. We were trapped. If we went up, the flying dinosaurs. If we went down, the city full of bright, bizarre, two-handed crabs. I said. We curved back toward the cliff wall. Four of us. Cassie and Marco in osprey morph, Ax as a northern harrier, and me, a peregrine falcon. We flapped at full speed for the cliffs. I could see colonies of the flying dinosaurs nesting there on crags in shallow caves. More were taking wing. Stupid! I was leading everyone right back toward more of the creatures. And yet it might just work. I was ten seconds from slamming right into the cliff. Five. Three! Something falling toward me! Quick turn left. Two dinosaurs, looking like miniature tyran-nosaurs, were falling, kicking and scrabbling. They'd leaped off the cliff! A shower of falling rock was dislodged behind them. They fell. The leather-winged flying dinosaurs closed in on us. In a flash of swift movement, one of the falling dinosaurs reached out with its little forepaw and snagged one of the leather wings! To my utter amazement, I saw him reach with his free claw to grab the other wing tip. The dinosaur spread the wings as far as it could. Twenty feet of leathery wing. Like a hang glider. Just enough to glide with. 147 The second dinosaur caught a leg on a jutting rock. It slowed the fall, but only for a second, then it tumbled away. But now there was enough time. The dinosaur with the living hang glider swept toward it. the first dinosaur yelled. It was as if someone had stuck a thousand volt wire in my ear. < Tobias?> WHAM! Tobias aimed for Rachel and slammed into her. Rachel was knocked into the cliff wall. Tobias was able to catch a ledge. Rachel scrabbled frantically, but kept missing her hold. She tumbled into a nest of the flying dinosaurs. There was a furious falling, rattling, screaming, dirt-flying tussle that rolled down the cliff, but when the dust cleared, there was Rachel . . . or at least a dinosaur. . . holding tight to the legs of one big leather wing and the neck of another. She dragged them down the side of that cliff, both of them flapping madly. I dove after her, calling to the others. Down, down, down. Then WHAM! She landed. But not on the valley floor. She landed in midair. She was crumpled on what 148 looked like midair. And the two tattered, leather wings were beside her. Also in midair. Ax yelled. I pulled up, just as my breastbone scraped along what seemed like a pure, clear glass roof. The others swooped down and landed on the force field. Cassie cried. <0f course, it's me,> Rachel said, sounding as if the idea of her being some little dinosaur who'd just jumped off a cliff, grabbed a pair of giant leather-wing dinosaurs and landed on an alien force field was totally normal. We were all treated to the utterly bizarre sight of an osprey attempting to hug a dinosaur. Marco began, <0f course,> Tobias said. Marco asked. Rachel said. 149 I asked. Tobias said. Rachel said. Every eye turned to Ax. He sounded a little exasperated. Tobias said. Marco moaned. <0h, man. Sixty-five million years! I thought it was just maybe six or seven million years. I was holding out hope that we'd find some primitive people. You know, like in that old movie Quest for Fire? Only the babe tribe, not the hairy tribe. There would be this primitive tribe and because of my superior knowledge I would become their ruler.> Rachel asked scornfully. Everyone laughed. Even Marco. It was good having the group together again. But I had to get us moving. Tobias pointed out. a voice said. I looked at Ax. He looked at me. Everyone looked at everyone else. None of us had spoken. None of us even knew the word "mercora." Out across the force field, they appeared very gradually. At first there was just a ripple in the air, then a sort of bad TV picture full of static. Then the picture was clear and real and three-dimensional. Ax said enthusiastically. We were face-to-face with the aliens. Not that we could be sure where the face was, exactly. 151 Ax We Andalites know more about alien races than anyone in the galaxy. We have been in space longer and traveled farther. Plus, we are scientists as well as warriors, so when we find a new race we study it. As opposed to wiping it out or enslaving it, as the Yeerks do. We know of the Gedds and Hork-Bajir and Taxxons, the Korla, the Skrit Na, the humans, and many, many others. But this race, these Mercora, were just strange. For one thing, they were not at all symmetrical. There were three of the creatures. They moved upon seven legs. Four on one side, three on the other. To make matters worse, the four 152 legs were larger than the three. So they scuttled sideways in the direction of the small legs. They stood about half the height of a tall human, and seven or eight feet wide. On the side with the four big legs, there was a sort of three-way pincer claw. It looked very powerful. It looked like the sort of thing I would not want to have to fight against. On the other side, the weak side, there were two arms similar to my own, but even stronger than human arms. The arms ended in long, tapered, delicate fingers. There were a lot of eyes. They kept opening and shutting, one or two or three at a time. They were each hidden beneath tiny trap doors in the Mercora's exoskeleton or shell. Eyes were forever appearing and disappearing. It was very, very distracting. Marco muttered. one of them said in thought-speak. Rachel whispered. 153 It is strange the way humans will resort to what they call humor when they are frightened. Once again it struck me as strange that they had risen to dominate the very dangerous and hostile environment of Earth. I wondered how well they would have fared if they had coexisted with the dinosaurs. the Mercora spokesman said. Cassie asked us all privately. Prince Jake said. Prince Jake stepped forward. As well as a falcon walking on a force field could step. He tilted his head toward me. The Mercora looked confused. Maybe. It was hard to tell. I can barely interpret human facial expressions. But in any case it opened and closed groups of eyes in rapid succession. Prince Jake said. I said. 154 Marco said. <"We are from the future." Thank goodness we have a brilliant alien Space-boy here who can explain things.> the Mercora said. I responded. Marco said dryly. Prince Jake said.