I was wrong. I had a whole extra speed.
Ahead of me I saw Jake, Rachel, and Ax all reach safety. Only Cassie and I were still deadly inches away from safety.
"RUN! RUN! RUNRUNRUNRUN!"
HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! Then . . . WHOOOOOOSH! Fuh-Wwwuuuummmp! The whole world seemed to explode around me. A wall of flame ...
a hurricane of hot air.
I was blown head over heels, somersaulting through air as hot as an oven.
JL somersaulted backward, hit steel floor again, and screeched like a skidding car. I plowed straight into Jake, and a split second later, Cassie plowed straight into me.
"Cassie! Cassie! Are you okay?" Jake asked.
"Yes, yes. I think so. Who can tell with this roach body?"
"l'm okay, too." I said.
"You know, just in case anyone cares."
"I guess they like to keep this building nice and warm, eh?" Rachel said.
"That was very close to being a disaster." Ax said. "We should thank the rat. If he had not chased us, we would have been crossing those gas jets several seconds later."
That was not a nice picture to think of. We would have fried, sizzled, and popped open faster than we could even try to think about de-morphing.
"That would have left a big wad of Marco mass floating in Z-space."
I muttered. I could joke about it, but I was quivering inside.
The rest of the trip through the heating and air-conditioning system was calm. But that just gave me time to think about the close call. One second slower, and I'd have gone out as a roasted spider.
"There are walls up here."
Jake warned from the head of our little pack of singed bugs. "No, wait, not walls. Like a maze. Like Erek said."
We traveled through a series of switchbacks, around a steel panel, then back around another. It was a light-blocking system. It would block out every last photon of light that might come through the vent.
Then we came to the edge of a drop. Beyond it, I knew, was the High Security Room itself -- the location of the Pemalite crystal.
We were six feet up. We had to drop, and then stay within two feet of the wall. Any movement farther toward the center of the huge room, and we would set off pressure sensors in the floor.
By this time, we were used to falling.
"Next I want to try jumping out of a plane.
Without a parachute." I said as I stepped into the black void.
It is an eerie experience falling in total dark ness. You have no idea where the floor is. It's al most like you're not falling at all. Until you hit the bottom, that is.
"Stay close to the wall."
Jake reminded everyone. "Hug the wall and demorph."
I was relieved to be human again. But my human eyes were no better than spider eyes at pen etrating the darkness. It was darker than any night. Darker than hiding in a closet at midnight.
This was the darkness of being buried alive.
"There could be six Hork-Bajir standing three inches away, and we wouldn't know it," I said, in a whisper that seemed to be deadened by the darkness itself.
"That's a nice thought," Rachel said dryly.
"Even a single photon of light would set off the light sensors." Ax said. "This is complete darkness."
"And according to Erek, if we stepped two feet away from the wall, we'd run into a maze of ultrasensitive wires. Any contact and the alarm goes off. We have to travel forty feet without touching a wire. Without touching the floor or ceiling or walls," Jake reminded us.
"Let's morph. We'll be able to see then,"
Cassie said. "Or maybe not see, exactly, but you know what I mean."
What she meant was that we would be able to echolocate. Kinda like the dolphin morph. We would be able to make very fast, ultrahigh sounds that the human ear would not even hear.
Those sounds would vibrate off any solid object and send back a sort of sound picture.
At least, that's what we hoped. We had been planning to practice and find out if it was true.
Instead, we were morphing without any knowledge of what we were getting into.
"Someday we'll think all this is funny," I said. "You know, if we happen to live long enough."
I focused my mind on the bat morph we had each acquired. They aren't as creepy as people think. Certainly not as creepy as morphing a spider. This particular bat was very small, just a few inches long. It looked like a mouse, with huge ears and the face of a Pekinese dog. If you forgot about the leathery wings, it was just another basic mammal.
But this was one case where the weirdness wasn't something you saw. I couldn't see anything. Nothing.
I couldn't see myself shrinking, the ground rushing up at me. I couldn't see the way my legs shrank to almost nothing and brown fur sprouted from my body.
I couldn't see the way my fingers grew so long and a paper-thin leather web filled the spaces between them.
I saw none of it. I didn't even know I was a bat, until my bat brain sent an order for me to open my mouth and chirp out a pulse of sound.
I fired a string of superfast sound pulses. Like making a loud machine-gun sound, only a lot higher, and way, way faster.
And then . . .
"Whoa, ho!" I said.
The entire black, pitch-black, invisible room, had just lit up.
It wasn't like seeing, exactly. It was like . . . like feeling, almost. Except it was like you were feeling from a distance. I felt a vast room. I felt thousands of wires strung taut, up and down, left to right, at angles.
And, at the center of the room, beyond the maze of wires, I felt a raised, flat surface, and a sort of pedestal.
There were curling wires coming from the top of the pedestal.
All that came in a flash. Then it was gone. The others each fired off their own echolocating blasts, but I couldn't feel their sounds as clearly.
"0kay, that is cool." Rachel said. "That is way cool."
"The wires seem awfully close together." Cassie worried. "I wish we'd had time to try out these wings. I guess all we can do is hope for the best. Trust the bat to do the flying."
"Abandon yourself to the Force, Cassie Sky-walker." I said.
"Thanks, Darth. You first."
"Me first? Oh." Suddenly, I didn't feel at all like laughing. I licked my lips with my little bat tongue. Assuming I had lips. I wasn't sure.
I opened my wings. I spread them wide and thought, Well, this should be interesting.
I tested the wings cautiously. They moved differently than bird wings. More like I was reaching out with each stroke to grab the air and push it behind me.
"0kay. Here goes."
I fired an echolocating burst and took off.
Fired again! There were tight strings all around me! Left! Left again! Down! No, up! Right, left, right, right, straight up! Again and again the high-pitched sound machine gun fired. Again and again I dodged, millimeters from a wire.
It was insane! It was so fast my human brain was three steps behind. It was instantaneous. It was impossible! The speed, the agility, the instant translation of the echolocating blasts.
And suddenly, I was through! I was through the wires.
I landed on the table in the center of the room. It was all over in ten seconds of lunatic flight.
"0kay, now that is a roller-coaster ride! Yes!" I said, incredibly jazzed from having made it.