Nada.
Squat."
Jake lowered his voice to just above a whisper.
"We need to check Erek out. Definitely something wrong there."
I put down my pencil. "You mean get inside his house?"
Jake shrugged. "Not yet. Get Tobias to watch him when he's outside. But Tobias will need some help."
I shrugged and went back to my paper. "I'll help. I'll have plenty of time. I'm dropping out of school this afternoon. Right after the teacher gets done laughing at this paper."
"Topic - the use of rhetoric to obscure a lack of content," Jake said.
I froze. I looked up. "That's brilliant! It means the same as "the use of total bull"
...
but it sounds so much better!"
"Eat your Goo. I gotta go."
He left and I saw him head over to the spot where Cassie was sitting.
It's one of our rules. We can never start look ing like a "group." In school or in public places, we keep our distance. We only reveal the relationships that already existed before we became Animorphs.
I happened to see Chapman coming in through the door of the cafeteria. He grabbed some kid who was running and told him to slow down. Then he gazed around the room, looking for troublemakers, like any normal vice principal would.
But Chapman isn't normal. Chapman is a Controller. The Yeerk in his head is high-ranking enough to speak directly with Visser Three.
For about a second, Chapman's eyes locked on mine.
It was nothing. But it sent a shiver up my spine.
Chapman runs The Sharing. The flyers that Erek had been handing out at the concert had been about The Sharing.
Erek had never been some major friend of mine. He was just this kid I'd say hi to in the hallway.
Except that he had been there for my mother's funeral.
A funeral without a body.
Some other kids from school had come, so I didn't think anything much about it. Still, it was a nice thing for him to do.
And now he was working for The Sharing.
The Sharing is a front organization for Controllers. On the surface, it's a sort of club. Kids join it and go on camp-outs and field trips and stuff. Adults join it and supposedly do business deals together and take weekends at ski resorts.
And probably most members of The Sharing never even know what's really going on. But the Controllers who run The Sharing are always on the lookout for some person with problems.
See, the Yeerks don't just spread by forcing themselves on people. A lot of people become Controllers by choice.
I guess they want to feel like they're part of something bigger. Or maybe it's the secrecy they think is cool. I don't know.
All I know is that the Yeerks would rather have a voluntary host. They'd rather have you surrender your mind than have to take it by force.
They work you up slowly through the levels of The Sharing, till they decide you're ready. Then they make promises and tell you lies, and the next thing you know, you're a slave inside your own mind, all the more easily controlled because you let it happen.
I shoved the tray away from me and picked up my pencil again. I stared down at the paper. But I was seeing a funeral service. Singing. Flowers. Some priest talking about how great my mother had been. He hadn't even known my mother.
I remember turning around in my pew to look at the church. A lot of people had come. A lot of sad faces. A lot of tears. Most people just looking solemn because that's the way you had to look at a funeral.
Erek had been three rows back. He was wear- ing a suit that was probably scratchy and uncomfortable. But he didn't look solemn. He looked angry. And he was shaking his head slowly, barely, from side to side, as if he was unconsciously disagreeing with everything the priest said.
At the time I figured he was mad because he had to dress up. I understood that.
And now Erek had reappeared. The boy who didn't smell human. The boy who worked for The Sharing.
"Well, Erek," I muttered under my breath, "we'll have to see about you. We will definitely have to see."
I here may be something in this world cooler than flying on your own wings, but I can't imagine what it is.
Rollerblading? Hah! Surfing? Big deal.
Skydiving? Closer, but not halfway to actual flying.
Nothing is as cool as flying.
It was after school that same day. I'd finished the English paper exactly nine seconds before the teacher came around to collect it. Then I'd gone to history and been assigned another paper. That's the nature of schooclass="underline" It never really ends.
But finally the bell rang and blessed freedom! I was outta there and looking for a private place to morph. I wanted to check up on Erek.
Remembering the funeral and all had made it seem even more important, although I wasn't sure I knew why.
I climbed up onto the roof of the gym. Of course, no one is supposed to go up there, but hey, it was for a good reason. I morphed into an osprey.
It's a bird, a kind of hawk that usually lives right near the water.
I spread my broad wings and I flew away from school.
Tell me you haven't sat there in some boring class, while some teacher went on and on (and on and on) about how x equaled y but only if you multiplied it by pi, and wished you could just fly right out the window. Zoom! Good-bye! Well, I can't fly right out of class because if I morphed in class there would be a lot of screaming and hysteria. But I can come close to doing it.
Kids were still piling onto the buses as I caught a nice little headwind and used it to go airborne. I zoomed high above all the kids heading for their buses, and all the teachers heading for their cars. People were just ovals of black, brown, blond, and red hair to me. That's mostly what a person looks like from a hundred feet up. A hair oval.
I have never felt as totally alive as when I'm in a hawk morph. Tobias doesn't have it all that bad, in some ways. There are so many worse animals to be.
I felt a thermal, a pillar of warm air, billow up beneath my wings and I went for it. Zoom! Like riding an elevator to the top floor! Up and up. The warm air currents swept me higher and higher.
"Yah-Hah!"
Now the hair ovals were just dots, and the buses were bright yellow toys pulling slowly away from the school.
But even from five hundred feet up in the air, as high as a fifty-story building, I could still see faces behind the school bus windows. With the osprey's eyes, it's like wearing binoculars.
I floated up there, wings spread wide, my tail fanned out to catch every bit of lift, my talons tucked back against the underside of my body.
Air rushed over the leading edge of my wings, making a slight fluttering sound. Wind flowed over my streamlined head, and I kept my hooked beak pointed forward to maintain every ounce of momentum.
I rode that thermal as high as it would carry me.
I'd learned that from Tobias. See, the thermal will give you altitude for almost no effort, and you can turn that altitude into distance. It's like soaring to the top of a mountain, then skiing down the slopes in whatever direction you want to go.
Still, it did eventually require some hard wing-flapping to get to Erek's neighborhood.
I spotted Tobias from far off, when he would have been invisible to any human eye. He was riding the wind, just like me. Maybe with a little more style, since he'd had so much more experi ence.
When I got close to enough to try thought- speak, I called to him.