The pickup truck was piled precariously high with wire cages. I climbed up and began to untie the rope that held them in place.
“It seems strange — Rachel going away — even for a couple days,” Cassie said. “And it seems even stranger that it would seem strange. I mean, it should be no big deal.”
“Well, I guess when life turns completely crazy, it’s the normal things that start to seem strange.”
Cassie nodded slowly. For a while she said nothing. She just stood there with her arms crossed, looking up at the moon.
I climbed down off the truck. “What’s bothering you?”
She shrugged. “Nothing. Just … a feeling. I don’t know. Bad dreams, I guess.”
“I have those, too,” I said. “We all do. You can’t live through all this and not have it bother you. What’s the dream about? The ant thing?”
We’d morphed ants once. We’d gone down into an ant tunnel and had been attacked by an enemy colony of ants. No one wanted to go through that, ever again. Not ever.
“No, not the ants,” Cassie said. “At least not directly. It’s … it’s dumb. There’s … something. I don’t even know what it is. But it’s not a good thing. And it asks me to make a choice. In the dream I have to decide who lives and who dies.”
I moved closer to Cassie and put my arm around her shoulder. There were goose bumps on her bare arms.
“I never used to be afraid, Jake,” Cassie said. “Not of anything. And now it’s like I’m afraid all the time.”
“You deal with it, though,” I said. It made me nervous talking about feelings like this. I guess I think if you just don’t talk about the fear, it will go away. “You always deal with it,” I repeated.
“So far,” Cassie said softly. “So far.”
About the Author
The Animorphs series, written by Katherine (K. A.) Applegate with her husband, Michael Grant, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and alerted the world to the presence of the Yeerks. Katherine and Michael are also the authors of the bestselling Remnants and Everworld series. On her own, Katherine is the author of Home of the Brave, Crenshaw, Wishtree, and the Newbery Medal–winning The One and Only Ivan. Michael is the author of the Gone and Front Lines series.
The invasion has begun.
Catch up on Newbery Medal–winner K. A. Applegate’s world-conquering series.
#1: The Invasion
#2: The Visitor
#3: The Encounter
#4: The Message
#5: The Predator
#6: The Capture
#7: The Stranger
#8: The Alien
#9: The Secret
#10: The Android
#11: The Forgotten
#12: The Reaction
#13: The Change
#14: The Unknown
#15: The Escape
#16: The Warning
#17: The Underground
#18: The Decision
#19: The Departure
#20: The Discovery
#21: The Threat
#22: The Solution
#23: The Pretender
#24: The Suspicion
#25: The Extreme
#26: The Attack
#27: The Exposed
#28: The Experiment
#29: The Sickness
#30: The Reunion
#31: The Conspiracy
#32: The Separation
#33: The Illusion
#34: The Prophecy
#35: The Proposal
#36: The Mutation
#37: The Weakness
#38: The Arrival
#39: The Hidden
#40: The Other
#41: The Familiar
#42: The Journey
#43: The Test
#44: The Unexpected
#45: The Revelation
#46: The Deception
#47: The Resistance
#48: The Return
#49: The Diversion
#50: The Ultimate
#51: The Absolute
#52: The Sacrifice
#53: The Answer
#54: The Beginning
<MEGAMORPHS>
#1: The Andalite’s Gift
#2: In the Time of Dinosaurs
#3: Elfangor’s Secret
#4: Back to Before
The Andalite Chronicles
The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
Visser
The Ellimist Chronicles
ALTERNAMORPHS
The First Journey
The Next Passage
Text copyright © 1999 by Scholastic Inc., based on the ANIMORPHS book series by K.A. Applegate.
Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, ANIMORPHS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
e-ISBN 978-0-439-06164-3
First edition, April 1999
