Marco made a deprecating noise. "Nan. This isn't serious."
"Every time we start to take something for granted we end up getting hammered," Jake warned. He grinned in anticipation. "We'd have to be nuts to get careless."
No one laughed.
"I say, we'd have to be nuts. . . oh, fine. Don't laugh. I don't care."
"We need an open window or something," I said. I looked over the building. No open windows that I could see. It was thick glass and heavy wire mesh all the way.
"We can't hurt anyone," Jake pointed out. "No fighting. Those are innocent people in there. We can't take the risk of hurting anyone. It's too far to travel in fly or cockroach morph. Hmmm. Maybe not that easy, after all."
Just then, like an answer to our prayers, a truck drove up the driveway and around to the far side of the facility.
"Was that a food truck?" Jake asked. "Tobias? Can you go take a look?"
Tobias flapped away and came back in less than a minute. "lt's a food delivery. The truck looks pretty big, and it's dark in the back." Jake nodded. "Okay, I don't think more than three of us should go. We morph to bird, fly into the truck, morph to human, then to cockroach. We hide in some of the food and they carry us right in. Rachel, this is your guy. I mean, you saved him. So you're in. I'll go. Tobias doesn't have a useful morph, and Ax is too obvious when he passes through his Andalite phase. So it's Marco or Cassie."
We flipped a coin. Marco won. Then we explained to Ax what it meant to flip a coin.
It took twenty minutes for us to find a place to morph into seagulls.
Seagulls were less noticeable than birds of prey. Unfortunately, the place we found was a Dumpster. It was an empty Dumpster, but still . . .
As soon as I had my snowy white wings, I was up and out of there. We zoomed around, gaining altitude, and watched as Ax and Cassie retrieved our shoes and outer clothes. We still can't morph regular clothing, just whatever is almost skintight. In my case a leotard.
Tobias stayed up at a higher altitude, looking for trouble of any kind.
The three of us waited and watched the back of the grocery truck. There were two guys unloading it. One looked like the driver. The other was wearing a white apron. Probably a cook or something from the facility itself.
"We need to time this right," Jake said. "l don't want to be a seagull trapped inside a truck."
"One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand . . ." Marco counted off the seconds between trips by the truck driver or white apron guy.
"How about right now?" I said. I spilled air from my wings and dove toward the back of the truck just as the driver went into the building, pushing a dolly loaded with tomato crates.
Jake and Marco fell in beside me and we swooped, swift and neat, into the dark of the truck. I opened my wings and tilted my tail down to kill my speed. Then I took a quick glance around and used my remaining momentum to zip over the top of a wall of cardboard boxes and land in a cramped area behind.
I felt pretty pleased with myself. Marco and Jake landed beside me.
Marco landed a little clumsily and sort of rolled and fluttered into the wall of the truck.
"That was dumb, Rachel," Jake said. "You should have waited."
"I knew it would work," I said. I seethed a little at Jake calling me dumb. He wasn't always so careful. Of course, he is our unofficial leader, so I guess he feels responsible. Although as far as I'm concerned, I'm responsible for me.
"Okay, let's demorph," Jake said. "But this space looks pretty tight back here. So everyone watch your elbows."
"I'm telling you, I saw some birds fly in here," an irate voice said.
"You see birds? I don't see any birds. Let's get this unloaded. I'm on overtime here, and my company don't pay overtime."
I heard some grunting and the sound of more boxes being lifted. I began to demorph as fast as I could.
Jake was right. It was crowded. We went from being three birds, each smaller than a chicken, to being three kids. We were jammed together, and it wasn't pretty. Marco's hand and fingers were just emerging from his feathers when his arm bones sprouted and forced the fingers into my eyes.
I twisted my head aside as well as I could. But my head was the size of a grapefruit, with my eyes still stuck on the sides and a beak jammed tight into the space between two boxes, so it was hard to move.
There was a pain in my back and I had this jolt of fear. Was I feeling the morphing itself? The Andalite morphing technology keeps that from happening, but was it failing somehow? The pain was pretty severe, like the pressure of a ... well, of a knee being driven into my back.
"Jake, do you have your knee in -" But just then, thought-speak stopped working as we crossed the line from mostly seagull to mostly human.
In another few seconds we were packed together like sardines in a can. I literally could not move. We were one big mess of knees and elbows and twisted heads.
"This is ridiculous," I muttered.
"Morph to cockroach," Jake managed to whisper.
I've never been crazy about morphing bugs. But this was one case where I was relieved. For once I wanted to get small.
I focused my thoughts on the cockroach. And somehow - I have no idea how - that triggered the cockroach DNA in my system to begin reformulating all the cells in my body.
Of course, a cockroach is minuscule compared to a human being. So I was about to become half as big as my own thumb. According to Ax, all the excess mass gets pushed into Zero-space, where it sort of hangs like a big wad of guts and hair and stuff.
As I morphed the cockroach, as I became smaller and smaller and smaller, more and more of me was being deposited in some blank, white nonspace.
It's not something I like to think about.
In any case, the morphing itself was so disgusting, it distracted me from any such worries.
See, although we were shrinking, we were all still pretty large when the cockroach features began to appear. The extra legs, for example.
Two extra legs sprouted from my chest. They just poked out, like they belonged there. They came out looking like sticks a few inches long. But they just grew and grew and became hairy and articulated. It happened to all of us at almost the same instant.