"It's a major fashion no-no," Marco said.

"Been reading Vogue again, Marco?" I teased.

Jake put his hand over Marco's mouth. "People? And I use the term loosely. We need to decide what we're doing next."

Marco pried Jake's hand away. "I want to decide what we're not doing next. I should be spending more time with my dad. You know, he's still messed up over my mom. . .."

63 Marco's voice always cracked whenever he mentioned his mom. He'd start out sounding tough and all, but his voice would end up with that little break, that little wobble. It had been two years since his mother disappeared. They said she drowned, although they never found her body. His father had fallen apart. It was the main reason Marco was so reluctant to be an Animorph. He was worried that if anything ever happened to him, his dad would just give up totally.

I could see that Jake was about to say some thing impatient. And I was feeling the same way, like Marco just needed to deal with reality.

But Cassie put her hand on Marco's arm. "Don't ever let any of this get in the way of spending time with your dad," she said earnestly. "He needs you. We need you, too, Marco, but your dad comes first." She looked at Jake, then at me.

"There isn't much point in doing any of this if we forget why we're doing it."

I thought about Melissa. And I thought about my mom and dad and how great it was to have them, even when they got on my nerves.

"Cassie's right. When you get home, tell your dad you love him, Marco." I blurted it out with out thinking about it. It wasn't the kind of thing I normally say.

"Thank you, Doctor Rachel,"Marco said.

He said it snidely, but I could see he knew what I was talking about. Then he was suddenly all business. He rubbed his hands together. "Okay, let's get serious here. How are we going to go about getting ourselves killed next? Turn into flies at a frog convention? Morph into turkeys at Thanksgiving?"

"I want to go back in," I said. "Back into Chapman's."

"Why?" Jake asked. "We learned a lot already. We -"

"We didn't learn the location of the Kandrona," I pointed out. "That's what we need to do, sooner or later. The Andalite made it pretty clear to Tobias that the Kandrona is the weak point for the Yeerks. The Kandrona sends out the rays that are concentrated in the Yeerk pools. If we destroy the Kandrona, we hurt them bad."

Marco raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Excuse me, Rachel, but what is a Kandrona? I mean, we know what it does, but what does it look like? How big is it? For all we know, the Kandrona could be the size of a lighter and be in Visser Three's pocket."

"That's not the impression I got from the Andalite," Tobias said.

"Whatever," Marco said impatiently. "The point is: How do we destroy something when we don't even know what it is?"

64 "That's why we have to follow the one lead we have," I said. "Chapman. Chapman communicates with Visser Three. The two of them know where the Kandrona is. If I can spy on them, maybe I can figure it out."

They were all staring at me. Marco looked at me like I was crazy. Jake looked thoughtful.

Cassie looked worried, like she wasn't sure about what I was saying.

Tobias turned his fierce, intimidating hawk's stare on me. "Are you sure you're just going back to spy on Chapman?" he asked me privately.

"I don't think you should go back in there alone," Jake said.

"How is anyone else going to go in with me?" I asked. "We can't have two cats running around. I mean, as Fluffer I can go anywhere without any of them being suspicious."

See ... I hadn't told anyone about Visser Three telling Chapman to kill me. I knew it was wrong to keep secrets like that from the group.

But if I'd told them, they would have never let me go back in.

Unfortunately, although Jake may not be all that perceptive, Cassie is.

"Are you sure nothing went wrong while you were in there, Rachel?" Cassie asked me. She was looking at me with this kind of sideways look Cassie gets when she's trying to figure someone out.

"It was scary," I said. "But nothing happened." It wasn't exactly a lie. Kind of a lie, but not exactly.

Cassie thought for a moment. Her eyes went blank. Suddenly I knew what was going on: Tobias was talking to her privately. He was telling her something. She nodded like she was agreeing.

Tobias didn't know what happened with Visser Three. But he did know that I was pretty freaky when I came up out of that basement.

"I think we should find a way for someone to go along with Rachel," Cassie suggested.

"What are you going to do, turn into a flea and ride on my back?" I asked her.

She smiled and gave a little shrug. "I'm just saying we should think about it."

"Okay then," Jake said. "Rachel goes in one more time. Maybe we'll get lucky."

"We haven't gotten lucky since we walked through that construction site and met our first alien," Marco said.

"Maybe that's going to change," I said. "I'm going in and I'm finding a way to hurt those creeps."

65 "That's not the only reason you're going back in there," Tobias said in my head. "You're not just doing it to hurt the Yeerks, you're going back in there because you want to help Melissa."

"Same thing," I said. I guess the others wondered who I was talking to.

66 Chapter Fifteen

It was a dark and stormy night.

Sorry, I've always wanted to write that. But it really was a dark and stormy night.

"Where is Jake?" I asked as we all got together down the street from Chapman's house.

Everyone else was there. Cassie and Marco were wearing raincoats, although it hadn't started raining yet. Tobias was overhead, trying to hold onto a branch in a tree while the wind tried to knock him off.

"Jake had to stay home," Marco said. "Some thing about his dad grounding him."

"Why would his dad ground him?"

"How do I know?" Marco said, sounding grouchy. "You know how parents are. Don't ask me to explain them."

I bit my lip. Somehow I felt more nervous with Jake being absent. The crazy wind whistling through the branches wasn't helping my confidence, either.

"I've spotted Fluffer," Tobias said so all could hear. "He's kind of torturing a little rat he's found. But at least it's not a shrew. "

"Look, I'm not a big fan of shrews just be cause I sort of was one." I took a deep breath.

"Okay, look, we can't always count on all of us being together, I guess. So we go without Jake."

I glanced at Cassie. She smiled blandly.

Something was going on with her, but I didn't have time to find out what.

"l'll scope out the area," Tobias volunteered. He opened his wings a little and was immediately propelled out of the tree by the wind. I watched as he rode it expertly, swooping quickly up into the air beyond the range of my weak human eyes.

After a while we saw something shooting over our heads at about fifty miles an hour. "All clear," Tobias called down as he shot past.

I felt strange. A little nauseous. A little scared. Everything seemed strange tonight. The weird thing was, I knew I'd feel better as soon as I morphed.

I concentrated. The first raindrop fell just as I felt my tail grow out behind me. By the time I had fallen to the ground, surrounded by the tent of my clothing, the rain had started for real.