"What do we do?" Cassie cried.
"Get out of here! Move! Move!" I yelled.
I caught a slight breeze and soared up and away. Armed men and more dogs encircled Ax.
Through the supposedly open window of the house, I saw other men running to surround Rachel.
Two of us captured. And I was to blame.
joined up, those of us who were left, on the roof of a Wendy's a quarter mile away. We hid there behind rooftop air conditioners and exhaust fans, amid the smell of grease and the rippling heat.
"How long have we been in morph?" I asked.
"l don't know," Marco yelled. "How am I supposed to know?"
"We could have gotten Ax out of there!" Tobias accused.
"They have Rachel and Ax," Cassie said frantically. "We have to get them back!"
It was panic. No one thinking clearly.
I tried to focus. But the air conditioners were
roaring. The stink of frying burgers and onions and ketchup was overpowering.
"l think ... I think we've been in morph about thirty minutes," I said.
"We have an hour and a half."
"To do what?" Tobias demanded. "That place is a fortress! Fences, dogs, and some kind of force field in the windows."
Controllers," Marco said. "Fenestre is a Controller. It was a trap. Has to be. Who else would shoot at birds?"
"Rachel and Ax will have to demorph in less than an hour and a half or be trapped," Cassie said. "An hour and a half. That's how long we have.
If they demorph surrounded by Controllers ... I mean, they'll know Rachel is human, which means they'll figure out that we're all human.
All except Ax."
"l know," I said. Actually, it was worse than that. See, Rachel knew she couldn't demorph where she could be seen by Controllers. If I knew Rachel, she'd rather be trapped forever in her eagle's body than let the truth out. She knew that if the Yeerks ever learned we were humans, not some bunch of renegade Andalites, our days were numbered. In low numbers.
"Being trapped in eagle form may not be the worst thing facing Rachel," Tobias said.
"0h, yeah, you'd think that!" Marco sneered with savage sarcasm.
"Maybe Rachel doesn't want to spend the rest of her life eating mice and living in trees like you, Tobias."
"That's not what I meant," Tobias snapped back. "l meant she may not be alive. Or the body she's trapped in may be injured beyond saving."
"Ax was alive, I'm sure of that," Cassie said, a bit calmer than the other two.
"Didn't any of this show up when you researched this lunatic's mansion?" Marco demanded of me.
I didn't answer. I had to think. Time was running out. Tobias and Marco were at each other's throats. Cassie was starting to moan about how they'd find her parents, sooner or later. How once they had Rachel it was only a matter of time.
I had to make a plan. But who was I to be making plans? I'd led everyone into a disaster. Rachel ... Ax ... all of us, maybe.
"l don't know what to do." It came out as a sob. I hadn't planned it.
Hadn't meant to say it.
"What?" Tobias said.
"Ticktock, ticktock," Marco said angrily. "We need a plan. Time is running out!"
"l don't have a plan, all right?!" I yelled.
"Don't give me that," Marco shouted in my head. "You got us into this, now get us out!"
"Leave him alone," Cassie said, coming to my defense.
But Marco's words had been spears aimed right at my heart. And Cassie defending me just made things worse.
My mind was split in two. Part of it was racing like an Indy car whose engine is ready to explode. Another part of it was swimming through molasses, stuck on the awful fact that Marco was right. I had failed my friends.
"We ... we could use cockroach morphs," Cassie said. "Crawl into the mansion and -"
"No time," Marco said. "We'd have to morph way outside the outer fence, then get all the way up the hill, hundreds of yards. Besides, they're Controllers in there. They'll be ready for us now."
"No," I said suddenly.
"No, what?" Tobias said.
"They aren't Controllers," I said, suddenly absolutely sure. "Any time we've ever gone after the Yeerks they may have used a lot of human-Controllers. But backing them up were always Hork-Bajir. No Hork-Bajir. And everyone used guns. Plain old, everyday guns. And dogs.
The Yeerks wouldn't use dogs."
"What kind of a human being would tell his guards to shoot birds?" Marco demanded.
"l don't know. But these are humans. Just humans. But Rachel and Ax may not know that.
We have to get them out of there. And we don't have time to be subtle."
"They still have guns," Cassie pointed out. "They may not have Dracon beams or squadrons of Hork-Bajir, but they still have guns and fences and dogs and probably some big, thick doors."
"Yeah, they do," I agreed. "And we don't have any morphs between us that are fast enough, and tough enough to bust into that place without getting shot up. But I have an idea. How far are we from The Gardens?" J. flew as fast as my falcon body could carry me, which was pretty fast.
But the wind was against me. I tried to tell myself it would all work out because on the way back the wind would be with me. But who can tell with the wind?
I left Marco and Cassie behind to keep an eye on things. I gave them instructions to do nothing. I didn't want us to get back and find they were captured, too.
But who was I to be giving anyone orders? I'd led my friends into a trap. A trap I might have expected if I'd taken the time to do some research. But no, I'd spent the night wasting time with my family.
Cassie had been right all along. We should
have tried to save Gump. That would have been the easy thing to do.
Instead I had to try and play the big general and decide to go after Fenestre, even without any preparation.