Chapter 5 I staggered back. I cried. I screamed again. I was trapped! I was trapped and there was chaos! And then it started. Too many more Hork-Bajir! Rachel screamed. I said. I yelled. Jake shouted. The rest of the Animorphs all swung wildly around. One of the Hork-Bajir helped one of them into a stuck Hork-Bajir. The other turned against the Hork-Bajir. They were all over me! I was on my back, stuck! I was a thing of dirt and broken glass and all the glass disintegrated, burning as far as I could see. I felt the impact of the rickety thing, pushing at it with its horns. Hork-Bajir circled around me, drawing their Dracon beams right for me. The snake-bit Hork- Bajir was surprised and slinked away into the darkness. I saw two other humans - one human in a Hork-Bajir morph, one in a nothlit. They stood over me. They had no arms. They had no legs. They were covered with snake bite marks. And they were monstrously huge. I cried. But I could see that my friends were losing it. They were losing it. Too little time. Too late. I was a thing of dirt and glass. Chapter 15 The hawk, no longer blind, began to glow. It moved surprisingly fast, almost as fast as a human eye could follow. I heard what sounded like a Dracon beam hit the base of the tree. A Dracon beam was aimed at the crow and fired. The crow flew away. A hawk does not die. I raised my arms. I was no longer blind. The hawk rose in a fury. Its eyes glittered with brilliant gold. And then my eyes stopped firing. “AAAAAHHHH!” “Hologram!” “Why are you all still alive?” I had a hard time believing that. I was still alive. I tried to get away. But the sky was dark. The first person I would see while I was still dead was a tall man in a dark suit. The man looked at me. “You’re dead,” he said. “No. I was,” I lied. I had killed a hawk. I had killed a human. And he had been a hawk to some extent. Better dead than me. The man looked up and down. He looked mindlessly at the ground. His face was twisted in a familiar pit of grief. The man let out a sigh. Then he smiled. A human face. A human mouth. A human tongue. He gave a human smile. The man let out a long, guttural cry. I needed to be sure of my own sanity. I had never looked at the man because, I realized, he was nervous. But he looked very human. He seemed to be drawn to me. I could feel this in his eyes. I could feel the strength in his hands. I watched him with my hawk’s eyes. He looked away. I saw him standing, talking to a woman, in a dark room. I saw him sitting down, with his hands on her hips, looking up at me. I saw the human girl shrink, grow faint. The human girl, my hawk, seen in her human dreams, too small to see anything but fear and terror. I saw the little hawk become human again. Chapter 14 - Jake I clicked and saw the Bug fighter go skyward, just a shred of a few hundred feet above us. I was bleeding. I was panting. “Rachel?” I called out, trying out the poison off my tongue. A moment later, I was in the struggle. The Bug fighter was zooming up, zooming out. Where? Back into the battle. I was there, in the midst of it all. The battle that had begun. “We’re going after something,” I yelled. “DEAL!” “Of course we are!” I was in the air, in midair, not even trying to breathe. I was in midair! I was airborne. I was still bleeding. “Rachel! Demorph!” “Rachel, demorph?!” I was demorphing, too. I was already human again. We were in the air. In midair. In high, looking down down on a ship. The ship was half a mile in the air. Above me, high above the ground, I could see the Bug fighter of the second ship. Above me, I saw the human Rachel. “I’ll morph!” I cried. “You’re not demorphing, Jake. Now, Rachel, you’re a little wet,” she said. We were all demorphing, but not fast enough. We were too small. Too wet. We demorphed and went down. Out into the darkness. I could see the damaged Bug fighter. I could see a red-and-green Beagle hovering over a ship in the air. Out into the distance, a dragonfly, taking control of the ship. I could even see the other people on the ship. We came too close. I felt the fabric of the ship being torn away by the wind. I was in midair, swimming in a liquid blue ocean. The dragonfly flew up to me and held out his hand. “There’s a hole in one of the sides of the Bug fighter. Inside, but not far.” I looked around. It was dark. We weren’t in the air. But I could see a riverboat. In the water above me, there was a narrow gully. I could see a low gash in the middle. The air was rushing and wet and rough. Now, the dragonfly had a plan. A plan in its own right. The sound of Dracon beams shattering the ground around us made me feel sick. Fortunately, the air above us was clean. The Dracon weapons were glowing. “Rachel!” I cried out. “Rachel! Demorph!” “Oh ... okay.” She demorphed in the air beside me. It was too late. She jumped back into the water and began demorphing. She was still a dragonfly before morphing. “See?” she said. “I know. I’m crawling out of my clothes, okay? I’m crocodile? I’m not dead yet.” “This is insane!” I yelled, but Rachel smiled. “I mean, it’s like getting into a fight with someone you can’t bite.” I felt my wings stretching. I was in a huge rush. I was scared. I was sick. I closed my eyes while I waited for her to emerge. One by one, I morphed.