We leaped over the bushes. I landed hard on my elbows and rolled under the camouflage of tiny leaves and stiff branches.
Ax leaped, too. But the bushes were only about two feet high. And Ax cannot roll.
A flashlight beam!
"Freeze! Don't move! What the . . ."
I heard the sound of a gun being cocked.
I peered through the bushes and saw a white circle of flashlight beam land squarely on Ax's upper body.
"What on Earth are you? Hey! Hey, Captain! Hey, over here!"
"Prince Jake, what should I do?" Ax asked.
More footsteps. Coming quickly.
"Captain! Look at this! Jeez, will you look at this?"
The first guard kept his beam on Ax. But the beam was shaking, wavering.
Not surprising. Ax is not what you'd expect to find on a dark night at a tourist destination aquarium.
The captain aimed a second beam. And I heard a second gun being drawn and cocked.
"What's that?" the captain asked calmly. "Why, that's an Andalite, son.
That is certainly an Andalite."
T what?"
"One move, Andalite, and I shoot you. These human weapons may be primitive, but you'd be surprised how effective a lead slug can be."
"Captain, you gotta tell me what's going on here," the first guard said plaintively.
Suddenly . . . WHAP! The captain swung his gun and hit the guard in the side of the head. The guard fell unconscious.
"A tiresome little man," the captain said. "But we'll have one of our people in his brain before he wakes up. Not that it will matter to me. I am off this tiresome detail! For capturing one of the Andalite bandits, I'll be Visser Three's new aide."
"Be careful what you wish for, Yeerk," Ax sneered. "l've seen the fools who work closely with Visser Three. I've seen their heads go rolling across the ground when the visser gets mad."
"What do we do?" I asked Jake in a voiceless whisper. His face was just two inches from mine.
"Ax needs a distraction."
It wasn't an order. Or even a suggestion for me to do something. But figured I was better at talking than any of the others. So I stood up on rattling knees.
"Hi. Is this the way to the souvenir stand?" I said cheerfully.
And at the same moment, something fell fast from the sky.
"Tseeeeer!" Tobias screamed. He raked the captain's face with his talons.
"Aarrgghhh!" the guard yelled as he clutched his torn face.
I leaped forward and grabbed the gun. Or tried to.
BOOOM!
The gun erupted. It seemed to explode in my hand. My hand went numb. I lost my grip.
BOOOM!
He picked it up and fired blindly into the dark. Inches from hitting me.
You know how guns sound on TV? Kind of like
TEWW! TEWW!? Well, in real life, guns don't make cute little popping sounds. They sound like bombs going off.
Ax was still too far off to use his tail. And the Controller was in a panic now. He was firing wildly.
BOOOM!BOOOM!BOOOM!
"Run!" Jake yelled.
So we ran. But the gunfire had attracted other guards. Controllers or just normal human guards, it almost didn't matter. They all had guns.
We hauled, racing through the darkness, feeling betrayed by the noise our own feet made on the concrete walkways.
"This way!" Cassie whispered.
She led us to a door. She yanked on it but it was locked. And we were trapped. There was no turning back.
"Ax," Jake said.
"Yes, Prince Jake." Ax whipped his tail, faster than the human eye could see.
CHWANG! A neat slice appeared in the steel door, right at the lock mechanism. Cassie tried it again. It opened, and we piled inside. Into a Plexiglas tunnel surrounded by water.
"I always wanted to come see this place," I said. "And look - no crowds."
It was eerie and dark. But not totally dark.
There were red exit lights glowing. And moonlight came filtering down through the water in the tanks.
In some ways, that made it a hundred times worse. Without any light, we'd just have been in a dark hallway. But with the light, we could see exactly where we were.
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.
"Now, this is an interesting human concept," Ax said approvingly. "This hologram makes it almost appear that we are under the water."
"Ax? It's not a hologram," Rachel said.
"Then ... we are underwater? Protected only by badly made human plastic?"
"Yeah."
"Why do you humans do things like this?"
"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."
"lf I go with them peacefully, they may let you all go," Ax said.
"Forget it," Rachel snapped. "We'll get out of this."