I positioned my jaws with their deadly fangs, and - "Marco. What are you doing?"
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.
"Nothing. I was just letting the spider be a spider." It was a pretty good answer, I thought. "I guess its instincts kind of carried me away."
"Marco, I morphed the identical spider." Ax said.
I felt a wave of guilt and shame suddenly swell up inside me. "Ax, it was just a cockroach. Who cares? Come on, we have a job to do."
"Sometimes humans worry 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? "I think it's this way." 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.
"Hey, Marco, Ax, you guys around?"
It was Jake's thought-speak voice.
"Yes, Prince Jake."
Ax answered. "We are here."
"We're not pretty, but we're here." I added.
"Cool. I'm not exactly handsome 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.
"You know, I'd been worrying someone might step on me." I said. "But humans are so slow."
"Be careful anyway."
Jake said. "let me know if you find Erek."
"I don't know how I'm supposed to recognize hm." I complained.
"These spider eyes aren't good at seeing distances. And human heads seem to be way up in the clouds, from where I'm crawling down here."
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?"
"Yes, I see it."
"What is x?"
"I do not know."
"lt looks like a machine, almost. Like it's made out of metal."
"Yes." Ax said.
"I think your friend Erek may be an android."
android?"
"Yes. A robot. A machine made to seem like a life-form." Ax said, as though it was just the most common idea in the world.
"This is like something you know about, Ax?"
I asked, looking up at the thing called Erek.
"This is not a type of android I know." Ax said. "lt is not Andalite. I don't 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.
"Jake?" I called.
"Yeah? Hey, I think I see our 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."
"Yep. That's hm." I confirmed.
"Wait a minute! There's another one!"
"Whatl"
"Another one of them."
Jake answered. "I just buzzed 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.
"AAAAAHHHHH!" 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.
"Marco!" Jake yelled.
"What's happening?"
"Marco! Everyone can hear y!" Ax warned.
I tried to control my panic. I was being swallowed, but I wasn't dead yet.
"Something . . . something just grabbed me!" I said, aiming my thought-speak at Jake and Ax only.
"I think it was a bird." Ax said. "I saw it. Very big and black. It 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.
"Tobias?" I cried desperately. "Can you hear me?"
"Marco? What's happening?"
Tobias answered. His reply came from far off.
"A bird ate me. Black bird.
We're flying. Can you see . . . his Help!"
"Marco, there are a dozen big crows 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.