We were in a plastic tunnel beneath millions of gallons of water. Literally, there had to be millions of gallons. Fifty or a hundred swimming pools' worth of water.

  And as we trotted down the tunnel, I could see ghostly pale gray shapes gliding by us on both sides and over our heads. Staring fish eyes appeared out of the gloom. Fish mouths gaped silently at us. And long, sleek, cutting shapes seemed to shadow our movements.

  Ax said approvingly.

  "Ax? It's not a hologram," Rachel said.

 

  "Yeah."

 

  "Freeze, Andalite!"

  It was a new guard. A Controller, too, obviously. He was standing twenty yards up the tunnel. He was in a firing stance, gun leveled at us.

  We turned to run back the way we'd come. But the captain came panting around the corner in hot pursuit.

  "Trapped!" Cassie said.

  "You got 'im, Captain?" the guard called out nervously.

  "Yeah!"

  "There are some kids with him!"

  "Forget the kids. We get kids breaking in here all the time. They're irrelevant. It's the Andalite we want."

  Ax said.

  "Forget it," Rachel snapped. "We'll get out of this."

  Brave words. But the guards had us trapped. And two very large guns were aimed straight at Ax.

  "Jake," I whispered. "This is bad. We need something drastic."

  "I'm open to suggestions," he muttered.

  "Okay. I suggest you take a deep breath."

  "Oh, no. Oh, man."

  "Yeah," I agreed. "Everyone take a deep breath. Ax-man? Just how badly made is human plastic?"

  It took Ax just a second to figure out what I was talking about.

  In a flash, he swung his tail. He swung it in a

  big arc. The blade sank into the Plexiglas. And it kept on cutting. It cut a three-foot gash in the plastic, and that was all it took. The water pressure did the rest.

  Crrrr-ACCCKK!

  FWOOOOOOSSHH!

  The water poured in like Niagara Falls.

  "TWOOOOOSH!

  A wave hit me and knocked my legs out from under me. The water picked me

  up and rocketed me down that Plexiglas tunnel. I went one way, everyone else was blown the other direction.

  I saw the captain just ahead of me. I hit him with my feet, doing about fifty miles an hour. He went down and the water rushed over him.

  "Jake! Rachel!" I yelled. But no one answered.

  Then I couldn't yell anything anymore. The water swept over me, filling the tunnel completely. I fought my way to the top of the tunnel

  and tried to suck up a big, squirmy, silver air bubble I saw. I got a mouthful of saltwater instead.

  Morph, you idiot! I told myself. I needed to go dolphin. No! Not dolphin. Dolphin needed to be able to reach the surface to breathe. I needed a fish. Long ago we had morphed trout. Could I still retrieve that morph?

  All this time I was still shooting along, carried by the rushing water. And then I realized I wasn't alone. There were fish with me. Big fish, little fish. All swimming around me.

  Air! I needed air!

  Bump! Something hit me. It brushed by me, spinning me around in the water. A body? One of the others? I spun around in the water. And, seeing me move, the shark came back toward me.

  I yelped in fear and gave up bubbles of precious air from my lungs. I shot my arms out and kicked my legs hard and backpedaled through the water.

  Morph a fish? The shark could eat either one of us!

  I began swimming. I had to get back to the break in the tunnel. The hole Ax had made. If I could get through that, I could reach the surface.

  Air! Air! My lungs were on fire! I could feel my throat spazzing as my lungs fought to fill themselves.

  I swam down that tunnel with the shark following lazily behind.

  Is it possible to sweat underwater? I felt like it was. My guts were jelly. My limbs were weak with fear, cramping up from lack of oxygen.

  No time to morph. Only time to flee.

  There! Was that the hole? Yes! It was a hole. A hole in the tunnel. No, wait. This hole was too round. Too perfectly round.

  No time to worry. I kicked hard and started up through the vertical hole. Suddenly my head broke the surface. Air! I sucked it down and spewed it out and sucked it down again, making gasping, sobbing sounds.

  Where was I? I was in a sort of vertical tunnel. It was no more than three feet wide. It extended above me for another five or six feet. And at the top there was a metal grill.

  "The air-conditioning," I gasped. My voice rang flat and hollow. I was in an air-conditioning vent. This was how they ventilated the tunnel. But I couldn't reach the grill overhead. And I was still treading water.

  The shark! I stuck my face back in the water and opened my eyes to look.

  I swear I nearly levitated. The shark was rising toward me like some kind of submarine-launched missile. I didn't think, I just reacted. I slammed my feet against one side of the shaft, my hands against the other, and I pressure-walked my way up and out of the water.

  My butt was still in the water when I saw that hideous face poke up to take a look at me. That hideous, hammerhead face, with its dead eyes at the end of each side.

  That got me up another foot. But the plastic was slippery. And I was too weak to keep it up for long.

  "Go kill something else, you monster!" I yelled at the shark.

  The head disappeared beneath the water. But I knew in my heart it was still there. Still waiting.

  "Ahhh! Ahhh!" My left hand slipped and almost lost it. There was no way this could last. I'd fall. Sooner, not later.

  Only one thing to do. I had to acquire that shark.

  Animals go limp when you acquire them, I told myself. Except when they don't. Like Tobias's dolphin.

  This was insane! I couldn't hold on. And if I dropped, my only hope was in actually grabbing hold of a hammerhead shark.

  The shark poked his snout above the water again. It was now or never.

  "If it turns out you eat me," I told the shark, "make it quick."

  I released my pressure. And I dropped. Directly onto the shark.

  It turns out, as tough as sharks are, they still aren't used to having screaming, flailing, panic-stricken human beings dropped on them from the sky.

  Pah-LOOOSH!

  I hit the shark and knocked him downward through the water. The two of us sank together, back into the main tunnel.

  Before the shark could recover its wits, I shot out my hand and I grabbed him by the dorsal fin, and I thought, Please, please, I'm begging you, be like a normal animal and go limp!

  I focused my mind. And to my infinite, profound, world-embracing relief, the hammerhead became peaceful and sluggish.

  I wrapped my arms around the big monster, happy I'd worn long sleeves, and we floated up through the gash Ax had made. Up toward air and the stars and freedom.

  He was still in an acquisition trance by the time my head broke the surface. We were in one of the tanks. The walls around were higher than

  they should have been, since the water had drained out to flood the tunnels. But up around the lip of the tank I saw anxious faces staring down.

  "Hey. What are you guys up to?" I asked.

  "Marco! You're alive!" Cassie said.

  "Yeah. And I brought someone for each of you to meet. Dive on in. It's hammerhead time."

  the next day there was a huge headline in the newspaper. A terrible accident at the Ocean World Aquarium. Two guards were missing. Also several fish.

  The one guard who did remain told a bizarre tale of a half-deer, half-human creature. The aquarium spokesman sort of implied that the guards must have gotten drunk and shot up the place, causing the tunnel to shatter.

  It was on the TV news and everything. CNN even sent a camera crew.

  On Monday I handed in five pages of pure, total babble as a book report. I wrote it on the bus. On Thursday I got it back. D-minus. The teacher

  wrote, "Nice try, Marco. Do it over, and this time try reading the book."

  What can I say? Some teachers buy it. Some don't.

  We had decided we couldn't go back to the Royal Island facility until the weekend. Sneaking out at night was risky. If one of us got caught and grounded, we'd be out of business for a while.

  I had stopped worrying what the others thought about my running from the sharks. I felt like my actions at the aquarium balanced that out. And I kind of felt like I'd gotten past my fear of sharks. More or less. I mean it's never a good idea to get casual about sharks.

  Instead of obsessing over being scared of sharks, I found I was obsessing about the shark DNA inside me. I wanted to morph that shark. I wanted to be it. I wanted to know what it felt like to be so relentless, so unafraid. So totally without emotion.

  Twice I dreamed about it. Both times in the dream I was a shark, only I still had my own face. And both times someone was doing something terrible. I can't remember what, I just remember thinking, Oh, man, that's awful. But in my dream I was a shark, and so whatever the terrible thing was, I was safe.

  I wish I could remember what the terrible

  thing was. I think maybe it was someone being killed. A woman's voice kept saying, "Help me, help me." I remember that much. But it was confusing because sometimes the voice would start yelling, "Help him, help him."

  After school Thursday, I hung around for a while. I went to the gym. I went to the pool. To my surprise, it was empty. The swim team was somewhere else, I guess. Maybe off shaving their legs and heads. I don't know.

  The pool is indoors. It smells of chlorine and mildew. It's one of those places that makes you think about athlete's foot, you know? It's white tile around the sides and dark blue on the bottom. There's a high board and a springboard. There are windows high up on one wall of the room, but mostly the light is fluorescent. There are lights like car high beams in the water itself. But still, it all manages to be gloomy, no matter how many lights are on.

  I knew what I was going to do. And I knew it was stupid. But I knew if I didn't do it here, I'd do it in some even stupider place. Like my bathtub at home.

  I went to my gym locker and changed into my gym shorts. Then I went back and checked the pool once more. No one. No one in the bleachers. No one in the water. Not a ripple.

  I jumped in, feet first, around the eight-foot marker. I bobbed back up to the surface and said, "This is insane, Marco."

  To which I answered, "So I'll be careful."

  To which I countered, "You're talking to yourself, do you know that?"

  "Oh, shut up," I said.

  I began to do what I had been wanting to do since Sunday. I began to focus my mind on the shark. I saw it in my memory. Saw it chasing me down that plastic tunnel.

  I pictured the moment when I touched the shark's sandpaper skin and brought it under the acquiring spell. And then, slowly, I felt the changes begin.

  It started with the squishy sound of my own bones dissolving. See, sharks don't have bones. Just cartilage.

  I could hear my bones. The bones in my arms. The bones in my legs. My hip bones, and even my spine, were all starting to dissolve.

  I could see down through the water, down to my feet. They shimmered against the deep blue background. They began to elongate. The toes stretched out and out, till each toe was a foot long. My calves followed them, stretching like Gumby. It was a total shock when I realized I was touching the bottom of the pool.

  Something was happening to my back. I felt

  something growing there, getting larger. It was building itself out of my melting bones.

  I reached behind me with my still-human fingers and touched something triangular. I was growing a dorsal fin!

  I felt the inside of my mouth itching. Itching amazingly, almost like teething pain.

  Shark's teeth were filling my mouth.

  Then . , .

  "Hey, wuss, get outta the pool!"

  There was a loud splash, then another. I spun around. Two heads coming toward me. Two sets of powerful arms churning the water.

  Drake and Woo. Two total jerks. Two abject, total bullies. They were also great divers for the school team. At least Drake was. Woo was a complete burnout. He had the I.Q. of cheese.

  "Get out of the pool, punk!" Woo said.

  "Don't make us kick your butt, Marco-roni," Drake added.

  I should have been afraid of them. But I was only afraid they might dive beneath the surface. If they went down there they'd see that I wasn't exactly normal. But from the surface they'd probably just think my ultra-long legs and toes were a distortion.

  I started to reverse the morph. I'd been an idiot! I'd left myself open for something like this. Jake would kill me. If he found out. I demorphed

  as fast as I could. I felt my toes lose contact with the pool bottom.

  Then Woo lay back in the water, raised one leg, and kicked me square in the chest with his foot.

  I didn't see it coming. Couldn't dodge the blow.

  "Ooomph!" The air burst from my lungs. I clutched at my chest.

  "Told you to step off," Drake said. "Now we're going to have to stomp you for not having any respect. Unless you want to get your skinny hinder out of the pool."

  Drake was giving me a chance to get away. All I had to do was turn around and leave. That was it.

  "Yeah, run home to your mommy, Marco-roni," Woo said.

  "He can't," Drake said, with a touch of normal humanity in his voice.

  "His mom's dead."

  "Oh, boo hoo," Woo sneered. "Oh, boo hoo, boo hoo." He made a little gesture like he was wiping tears out of his eyes. "His mother probably just ran off with some dude."

  All I had to do was walk away. And all I did was to stare at Woo's throat.

  I could see the arteries there. The ones that were pulsating on either side of Woo's Adam's apple.

  "What are you looking at?" Woo demanded. "You're dead, man, eyeballing me like that."

  But I noticed that Woo didn't move toward me. I wanted him to move toward me. I wanted him to.

  "What's the matter with his eyes?" Drake asked. "Look at his eyes, man."

  "Marco?" It was Jake's voice.

  I saw the expression on Woo's face change. He was looking past me now. I heard footsteps on the tile.

  "What's up, Marco?" Jake asked, trying to sound casual.

  "Ah, isn't that sweet?" Drake said. "Big Jake is here to rescue little Marco-roni."

  I swung my heard fiercely toward Jake. I grimaced, baring my teeth. "I thon't neeth you help."

  The shark's teeth that filled my mouth distorted my speech. I saw Jake's eyes flare in surprise. Then wary concern.

  "Let it go, Marco," Jake said.

  I turned back toward Woo. I could still see the pulsing blood just below the skin of Woo's neck. It would be so easy . . .

  "He dithed my mom," I said.

  "He's not the one responsible for your mother," Jake said. "Don't punish him for the sins of someone else."

  I don't know what the two bullies thought of this exchange. I just know they stayed silent. Woo's eyes kept darting from me to Jake. He was confused and worried. Bullies aren't used to hearing their victims talking and acting like they have all the power. Or maybe he didn't like the way I was still staring at his neck.

  "Save it for the real bad guys, Marco," Jake said.

  I let the rest of my shark morph go. I felt the itching in my mouth as my normal teeth replaced the killing shark teeth.

  I climbed out of the pool.

  "What's the matter with you?" Jake demanded once we were out of there.

  I shrugged and forced a smile. "Not a thing, Jake. I guess Woo just looked a little like a fish to me. He look like a fish to you? He does to me."

  Not even slightly funny. But it was the best I could do. Jake gave me a long look.

  "Maybe you'd better sit out this next mission, Marco."

 

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