Micky had landed closer to the pavement, where dangerous feet trod past, and he was spinning around on his back. Molly scuttled toward him and, with her face under his wings, heaved him over.
“I don’t like being a—” Micky didn’t finish his sentence, for a massive feathered monster was standing over them. A scruffy, mangy pigeon stared down at Molly and Micky, cocking its head as it contemplated the two tasty morsels.
With a sudden, vicious movement, it lunged. Its beak hit the paving stone between the two ladybugs, grazing Molly’s left wing.
“Oh, no!” Micky was speechless.
“Hide!” Molly screamed.
Micky and Molly dived for cover where a small broken piece of masonry had left a tiny hole in the wall. But even in the crack they weren’t safe, for the pigeon was hungry. It began to peck relentlessly at the stone, determined to oust its supper.
“I don’t want to be eaten by a pigeon!” Micky screamed. “I don’t want to be chomped up by a…by a…beeeeak.”
“Just—just control yourself, Micky,” Molly said, squishing into the hole as far as she could. Then another beak began to peck at their hiding place, too.
“Two of them! Jeepers!” Micky screeched. “You know birds are related to dinosaurs! T. rexes, velociraptors, allosauruses!”
“Calm down, Micky,” Molly pleaded, starting to feel desperate herself.
“What do you mean, calm down? Those beaks are like car-sized pick axes.”
Molly’s insides lurched with fear.
Calm. Calm. Molly tried to find some amid the terror of the moment.
“I know!” she gasped. “We should just morph into them!”
“What?”
“Morph, you ningbat. Like before.”
“But…but we have to find a pattern—there isn’t one.”
“Yes, there is.” Molly gulped. “Look at the wall.”
Micky raised his eyes. It was true. The stone was covered with green mildew.
“Okay, okay, okay,” he stuttered. “Okay. I’ll try and turn into the scruffy one.”
Molly and Micky grew quiet and focused, for they knew their lives depended upon it. Both stared at the green algae, ignoring the horrible pecking that threatened to snap them up. Molly saw a picture first. The strange pattern of algae began to look like a dog. Immediately holding this image to the side of her mind, she thought of what it was to be a pigeon. She looked at the beady, cold eyes of the bird that pecked so intently. She considered its feathers and wings.
And, amazingly, she found it quite easy to find the essence of pigeon.
Good-bye, and thank you! she managed to think to the ladybug.
For a millimoment, she was nothing. Then she got the watery tipping feeling as her mind and her spirit washed into the pigeon. The creature stopped pecking. Like a gadget suddenly without batteries, it stood stock still. Its pea-brained mind registered Molly’s arrival. For a moment, it attempted to push her out. But its efforts were a futile grapple. In the next second, Molly eclipsed its personality and took charge of its body. She flexed her new, scrawny bird legs with claws on the end and stretched out her muscley wings. She peered out of its beady black eyes over her new pale, dirty beak. Below her, the ladybug whose body she’d borrowed stood stunned as it recovered.
Molly shook her feathery self and observed the inside of the pigeon’s mind. She saw rooftops and streets as though from a bird’s-eye view. She saw a great white sculpture of a woman with no arms, on which the pigeon liked to sit on sunny days.
Then she noticed that the other pigeon was still pecking at the ladybugs and knew that Micky hadn’t managed the morph yet. Quickly Molly gave the scruffy pigeon a sharp jab in the neck. For a moment she thought the creature would peck her back, since he was bigger than her. But instead it went very quiet.
“Is that you, Micky?” Molly asked.
“Just made it,” the scruffy pigeon replied, his voice a coarse trill. “Let’s fly up to that corner balcony before we get into any more trouble.” With the ladybug flying lessons under their belts, the twins flapped up to a balcony.
“Scary being a ladybug, wasn’t it?” said Micky as they landed. “Suppose it’s fine if you’re on a rosebush in the summer, eating aphids.”
“Yes,” Molly agreed, folding her wings. “And then, scary to be an aphid.”
Below, the traffic flowed past, a river of machinery.
“You know we’re in trouble, Molly, don’t you?” Micky suddenly said. “We can morph from animal to animal, but we don’t know how to morph back into ourselves. I mean, we have to choose the creature we want to morph into, don’t we? But Molly and Micky, the real us, aren’t here…. The question is, where are our bodies, Molly?” A cold wind ruffled the feathers on his neck. Instinctively, he puffed himself out to keep warm.
“Maybe,” Molly said, “we have to morph into a human first, and then maybe we’ll feel how to do it.”
Molly peered down at the two streets below. Near the hat shop was an alley where she could see some rats foraging near a smelly bin. She looked down at the main street.
“That old couple waiting for a bus,” she said. “How about them? You be the man, I’ll be the woman.”
The old woman was dressed in a brown-and-yellow tweed coat with a green hand-knitted wool hat on. She was sucking on a piece of candy and clutching her brown handbag tightly with mittened hands. She had a weatherbeaten face, pink cheeks, and little brown eyes that glittered behind round spectacles, and her gray hair was as thin as cotton candy. The old man wore a flat, dark blue beret and a nylon raincoat. Molly saw that imagining the old woman as a child wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought. She wondered whether mind reading would help, so, pulling her thoughts together, Molly sent out the message, Old lady, what are you thinking? However, to Molly’s disappointment, a bubble didn’t appear above the woman’s head. It was as if mind reading was something Molly could only do in her Molly Moon body. Molly shrugged her bird shoulders. She supposed it didn’t really matter. The book hadn’t said that mind reading would help a person to morph.
“Are you ready?” Micky the pigeon asked. Molly nodded. And they both began.
Molly looked about for a pattern. The bus shelter was good, as it had glass on the front of it that was stained with old watermarks. The drips definitely looked like mountains. Holding these in her mind, Molly did her best to imagine the old woman as a child. She would have been smaller and thinner, Molly thought, and much less wrinkly, of course. She would be wearing a child’s coat and hat, with a satchel instead of a bag. Molly’s eyes considered the old lady’s face and drank it in. And as though she had a magic eraser, her imagination erased the crow lines around her eyes and the puppetlike marionette lines around her mouth. The creases of her brow and the puckering around her chin dissolved, and the old lady’s mottled skin was replaced by the fresh complexion of a child.
Molly pulled the image of the water-stained mountain range into the center of her mind. And as the two visions merged, Molly aimed her being at the old lady. She felt herself shiver and quiver, and suddenly she lost all sensation of her claws, her wing tips, and her tail.
“Good-bye, and thank you!” Molly managed to cry as she whizzed away. In a split second she couldn’t feel her pigeon body at all. But this moment was minuscule, for in the next, the pouring feeling swished through Molly.
“EEK!” the old lady shrieked.
Molly had done it! She’d morphed into a human body. The idea of it was so miraculous and the sensation so spectacular that for a moment Molly was half stunned with amazement.