outsized. From the end of each one, a wicked, curved fang grew.

  Sometimes you really, really need eyelids. There are definitely some things you don't want to have to see.

  I knew the same thing was happening to me. My bulging jaw parts grew till they entered my own distorted field of vision.

  Fortunately, I didn't have to worry too long about the jaws. See, I became distracted when legs suddenly exploded from my chest.

  SPROOOT!

  Four new legs, two on each side, just shot out of me, like I was a tube of toothpaste someone had stomped. They sprouted all Gumby-unformed, then began to form joints. Way too many joints.

  My human legs and arms were changing to match these first spider legs. I fell forward, no longer able to stand erect.

  It wasn't much of a fall. I was already pretty small. The pine needles beneath me already seemed to be as big around as a human finger.

  Not that I had any fingers left to compare with. All the while, new eyes kept opening suddenly where eyes absolutely did not belong. Some were compound eyes. Some weren't.

  Then, as if the extra legs, and the mix "n" match eyes, and the huge jaw-and-fang combo weren't enough, some new leglike things came sprouting out of my ... well, out of where my neck used to be. They were like extra legs, only they weren't. I had no idea what they were. But they moved. Much later, I found out they're called

  pedipalps.

  A sort of cross between a mouth part and a leg. My head was swelling, compared to the rest of my body. It was gigantic ... in a small

  way. My entire body was now divided into two big chunks: a sort of bulging head and an even bulgier body.

  I was almost entirely spider now. The pine needles that had seemed as big as fingers were now as big as two-by-fours.

  As the last touch, strangely soft hairs began to grow from everywhere on my body.

  It was the hair that seemed to trigger the awakening of the spider brain.

  The wolf spider has good eyes for a spider. But it's all the thousands of tiny hairs that really get the spider brain's attention. They sense every subtle clue in the wind. Every minor movement in every direction.

  And all of a sudden it felt like the whole world was moving: leaves, pine needles, the dirt beneath my claw-tipped eight legs, bugs in the dirt,

  moles under the ground, birds in the air.

  All of it seemed to be hardwired into the hairs that covered my spider body.

  With all that sensory overload, the spider brain woke up. I had been afraid it would be like the brain of an ant: a mindless machine. Or that it would be the terrified, fearful, panic-stricken

  mind of a prey animal.

  But oh, no. Definitely no.

  They didn't call it a wolf spider for nothing. This guy was tiny, no more than two inches from the end of one outstretched leg to the end of the farthest back leg. A toddler could easily crush him underfoot. But I guess it isn't size alone that makes a predator, because as soon as I felt the edge of that spider brain I knew this boy was trouble.

  The wolf spider was a killer.

  Hunger.

  That was pretty much what the spider mind had to say: hunger, it was hungry. It wanted to hunt. It wanted to kill. It wanted to eat up a few nice juicy bugs. It was hungry.

  Did I mention hunger?

  And it didn't care what kind of bug. Could be beetles, could be grasshoppers, could be

  crickets, could be a big mean mantis. The

  spider didn't care. It ruled the world of bugs. It was to bugs what a lion is to a herd of

  antelopes. It was a shark among guppies.

  They could run from the wolf spider, but they couldn't hide.

  Motion! Something moved, left to right across my field of vision, and I was after it like a dog af ter a rabbit.

  Eight legs powered up and I blew across the forest floor like a drag racer firing out of the start ing gate.

  The world was weird to my eight spider eyes. I saw colors no human ever saw. It was like when you mess with the color and tint knobs on the TV. Things that should have been brown were blue, and green was red, or whatever. From some an gles the pictures were almost clear, but a second later everything would shatter into bits and I'd be watching a million tiny monitors at once.

  I never could make logical sense out of it. But mostly what I saw was movement. I was very, very interested in movement. My eyes and

  every hair on my disgusting little body were about spotting movement.

  And when the right thing moved, my body just answered all on its own.

  It was a rush, as they used to say in my dad's day. A charge. It was like tapping into the main pipe of adrenaline. It was electric. It was nuclear.

  I blew across pine needles and fallen leaves and over patches of dirt and I kept that moving bug in my field of vision and I knew what I was doing, I mean, I knew I was Marco, a human in

  morph,

  and I knew I didn't really want to eat that racing

  bug, but man, I was too jazzed to stop.

  The prey was running and I was the predator. I had evolved for hundreds of millions of years to do exactly this. When Tyrannosaurus rex was still millions of years away from even thinking about evolving, tiny arachnid hunters were killing and eating. The entire history of Homo sapiens from caveman to soccer mom was a blip in the history of spiders.

  I was death on eight legs.

  It was a beetle. That's what I was chasing. A big old beetle, much larger than I was.

  Larger and slower. He grew in my distorted field of vision. He grew and grew and I powered on. I wish I could explain why I kept on with the hunt. Sometimes the animal brain takes over for a while and sort of overwhelms the human mind. But that's not what was happening to me. I wasn't overwhelmed. I was just into it.

  A last burst of speed!

  My front legs touched the beetle. He

  dodged left, but too slow.

  I clambered right up on his back.

  I positioned my jaws with their deadly fangs, and

 

  It was Ax. I scampered down off the beetle, feeling like I'd been caught doing something wrong. The beetle ran on, relieved to have escaped. If beetles can feel relief.

  It was a pretty good answer,

  I thought.

 
  spider.> Ax said.

  I felt a wave of guilt and shame suddenly swell up inside me.
  cockroach. Who cares? Come on, we have a job to do.>

 
  me.> Ax said.

  I didn't ask him what he meant.

  Why had I gotten so into the hunt? Why hadn't I resisted the urge?

  I flashed on the rage I'd felt when I

  talked to Tom. Was that it?

  Ax

  said. He took the lead and I saw him moving in front of me, a spider scurrying effortlessly on his eight legs.

  I fell in behind him. I was calm now. The incredible, insane rush of the chase was over. Now the spider was just a tool I was using.

  Suddenly, from the sky . . . something fell toward me!

  It landed right between Ax and me. A grasshopper, three, four times our size. It looked like an elephant.

  Then . . . thwap! It fired its huge hind

  legs and shot into the air. It disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

  We raced on through the forest, covering the two hundred feet between us and the edge of the party. I sensed the nearness of humans. I "heard" vibrations that might have been speech, but the voices were too garbled to make any sense out of.

 
  guys around?>

  It was Jake's thought-speak voice.

 

  Ax answered.

 
  here.> I added.

 
  myself. I'm in fly morph. Haven't found our boy Erek yet, though.>

  Something massive and slow appeared in the air above me. I scampered sideways. It landed slowly with a loud WHOOOMPHHH!

  A human foot. A shoe. Nike.

 
  might step on me.> I said.

 

  Jake said.
  Erek.>

 
  to recognize hm.> I complained.

  But Ax and I went on, skittering

  swiftly through a forest of huge, slow-moving legs and feet.

  Then, right in front of me, I saw it.

  It looked like a bare human foot. Except that I

  could see through the skin. Through the toenails. With my eight strange, distorted spider eyes I could see right through the electronic haze of the hologram. I could see what was beneath the hologram. I saw what looked like interlocking plates of steel and ivory. The "foot" had no toes. In fact, it wasn't shaped like a human foot. More like a paw.

  It was not human. And everything in my tingling, buzzing, hyper, spider's senses told me it was not alive.

 

 

 

 

 

  Ax said.

 
  android.>

  android?>

 
  to seem like a

  life-form.> Ax said, as though it was just the most common idea in the world.

 
  Ax?>

  I asked, looking up at the thing called Erek.

 
  know.> Ax

  said.
  think it is Yeerk.

  I don't know who

  ...

  or

  what

  ...

  it is.>

  My spider eyes could see the foot and most of the way up the leg. It was like looking at a

  double-exposure photograph. There was the out ward appearance of a human leg and, way up

  high, shorts. But beneath ail that there was this machine made of what seemed like steel and ivory. It was thousands of interlocked plates,

  almost like the chain mail armor knights used to wear. Each of the individual links was roughly triangular in shape. The "ivory" segments were a little larger than the segments that looked like steel.

  The robot . . . android . . . whatever it was, was smaller than the human Erek. The leg I was looking at was oddly constructed. More like a stretched-out dog leg than a human leg.

  The robot leg, along with its holographic projection of a human foot, lifted off, as Erek went on his way.

  I called.

 
  guy. There's this person . . . it's hard with fly senses, but I see this person who is kind of shimmering all over, and it's like there's something hiding underneath all the shimmering light.>

  I

  confirmed.

 
  one!>

 

 
  them.>

  Jake answered.
  right past him. There are two of these things.>

  <0kay, northings have gotten

  com> I started to say.

  FWAP! FWAP! FWAP! FWAP!

  A hurricane of wind!

  The ground in front of me exploded as two big taloned feet landed in the dirt.

  A shadow over my head! I ran.

  Two big black triangles came down from the sky above me. They dug in, just in front of me!

  Just behind me!

  Like a power shovel, the two triangles closed together. I was inside. I was in darkness. Total darkness. Some big, muscular thing was crushing me, squeezing me.

  I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see. I was being squeezed and pummeled.

  And then I realized . . .

  I was being swallowed.

  I

  yelled.

  There are two kinds of thought-speak. Private, which is like whispering right in one person's ear, and public, which is like yelling.

  I was yell ing.

  Every person near that lake heard me. Normal humans, who probably wondered, "What was that?" And Controllers, who knew it was thought-speak. But I didn't care. I was being swallowed.

  Jake yelled.

 

 
  y!> Ax warned.

  I tried to control my panic. I was being

  swallowed, but I wasn't dead yet.

  I said, aiming my thought-speak at

  Jake and Ax only.

  Ax

  said.
  flew off.>

  My spider legs were crushed against my side. Two of them were broken. The hairs all over my body were blind. My eyes were blind. There wasn't enough air even for my spider body to live on.

  I was being forced down the gullet of a bird, flying through the air, and seconds away from suffocating.

  I cried

  desperately.
  me?>

 

  Tobias answered. His reply came from far off.

 
  We're flying. Can you see . . . his

  Help!>

 
  flying. I can't tell which one.>

  I felt my mind beginning to fade. The spider was dying.

  What would happen if the spider

  died?

  I wondered, as my attention drifted away.

  What would happen to the big wad of Marco

  mass in Z-space?

  That thought did it. I was outta there.

  Morph out!

  I tried to form a mental picture of my own real self. A mental picture of a human named Marco. But it was all confused. My mind was dying, and as it sank it called up a thousand images. Images of wolves and giant ants and

  gorillas. Images of all the animals I had

  been, all the minds I had lived in.

  I couldn't grab that human image and hold onto it. But then, floating up in my

  disintegrating consciousness, came the image of my mother.

  I guess that's not a surprise. They say dying soldiers on the battlefield often call out for their mothers with their dying breaths. And I guess that's what I was doing, too.

  But this was my real mother. The way she'd been when she was truly alive. Not the Controller. Not the Controller known as Visser One, but my own real mom.

  She was smiling at me. She was much taller than me, but she bent down to pick me up. I flew, up in the air, up to her face. She kissed me.

  "You are going to grow up to be so cute," she said.

  "My little Marco."

  Marco. The human boy. I saw myself clearly then, like I was looking through her eyes at the little toddler I'd been. Not the Animorph Marco, but the little kid Marco.

  Suddenly . . .

  The pressure was growing. Growing. I was squeezed from all sides. I felt muscle tensing to restrain me, but then, the muscle weakened and quivered. A ripping, tearing sound!

  Light! Light!

  I was demorphing. Demorphing and growing. I had burst through the throat of the crow! And now, I was falling!

  Tobias yelled.

  Muddy, distorted vision showed me the crow falling alongside me.

  I was falling. Falling through the air, a vile mix of crippled spider and emerging human.

  I was the size of a baseball, I guess, and getting bigger. I hate to even think of what I looked like. I know I wasn't pretty.

  WHAMMMMM!

  I hit the ground. I bounced. I hit the ground again.

  I lay there, not knowing where I was, or what I was. But I knew one thing for sure. I was going to demorph. I was getting OUT OF THAT

  MORPH!

  If I'd had a mouth, I would have started screaming and never stopped. But my mouth reappeared late. Four of my spider legs withered and disappeared. My remaining legs became human arms and legs. My tiny claws became toes. My fangs and jaws

  became teeth and lips.

  My eight spider eyes shut down one after

  another, leaving only two. And slowly, those two eyes became fully human.

  I looked up through human eyes at a blue

  sky. At the high branches of trees looming above me.

  And then, I looked up into the face of my former schoolmate, Erek.

  Erek the android.

  Marco?" Erek said. "Didn't you used to have longer hair?"

  The hair thing again. Anyway, to my human eyes Erek looked completely, one hundred percent human. I knew it wasn't true, but even so, it was almost impossible not to believe the holographic projection that surrounded the android.

  Could I remorph into something powerful enough to ... to make sure he wouldn't be a problem? Probably not. There were Controllers all around the area. All he had to do was yell for help.

  Just then, a girl came running up. She looked down at me, then at Erek.

  "Who is this?" the girl asked.

  "His name is Marco," Erek said calmly. "You know the "Andalite bandits" Chapman is always talking about? The ones who use Andalite morph-+ technology to carry on a guerrilla

  war?"

  "Of course," she said.

  Erek pointed down at me. "I think this human is one of them."

  There it was: the end. The end of our existence as Animorphs. We'd always known that if the Yeerks ever discovered our true identities, or even that we were humans, they would wipe us out within a matter of days.

  I felt sick. Sick with fear for myself, and for the others. I'd blown it. I'd given away our great secret.

  Erek jerked his head toward the girl. "This is my friend Jenny."

  I was not pleased to meet her.

  I heard the sound of people rushing through bushes.

  "Nothing over here," Erek said loudly. "Jenny hurt her ankle. I'll help her. Keep

 

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