There were blindingly bright spotlights mounted atop the building. The forest had been cut back a hundred feet or so on all sides of the building, and the bare, scarred earth all around was lit as bright as the sunniest day.

A dozen or so huge pieces of equipment were parked neatly side by side. Earthmovers, oddly shaped cranes, trucks, and some monstrous thing that looked like a huge kid's toy. I guessed that it was used to cut trees.

My heightened wolf senses noticed several men walking around the perimeter of the clearing.

They were spaced about fifty yards apart and seemed very alert.

The nearest one was walking just in front of us. Marco and I crouched low behind tree trunks and stood perfectly still.

The man wore a tan uniform. The legs of his pants were tucked into high leather boots. He was carrying an automatic rifle.

"Okay, this does look just slightly extreme for a logging camp. That guy is no lumberjack," I said.

I aimed my ears at the building, but no sounds came from inside. Either there was no one in there or they had soundproofed the place really well.

"Are you getting anything?" Marco asked me.

"Not from inside the building. But I'm smelling stuff that I can't recognize. Weird smells. "

"Yeah. Me, too. Animal smells, but weird, you know?"

"Hork-Bajir?"

"Could be," Marco said.

"The guards are all human," I pointed out. "You know, this may have nothing to do with the Yeerks. Maybe whoever these guys are, they're up to something totally different. I mean, normal humans do act strange sometimes. Not every weird person is a Controller."

"No. But don't forget -- the force field. Even if these guys were like drug dealers or something, I don't think they'd have a force field."

"Good point. " I fell silent. I had heard a noise. Several noises. Movement. Careful, stealthy movement.

I glanced at Marco. I saw that his ears were pricked up, too. "Yeah, I heard it," Marco said.

22 "Behind us. Someone circling around. "

I felt the knife edge of fear. The human part of me was afraid. The wolf me was not. But I trusted the human instinct more on this.

"Where are the guards?" I asked.

"Uh-oh," Marco said.

Blinding light!

Light everywhere. Everywhere! The whole world was a brilliant white.

I felt like the whole universe could see me.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

The sound of sharp, cracking explosions in the trees above us. I glanced up. Something falling. A net!

Big steel nets were exploding from the trees above us, falling toward us. There were heavy weights at the edges.

"RUN!"

We bolted. The net above me fell. I was racing the falling edge, racing, racing . . .

Free!

The net scraped my back. But I was out from under!

TSEWWW! TSEWWW!

A brilliant stab of red light shot from the dark upper windows of the log building. The beam hit the base of a tree not six inches from me. The wood was vaporized. A six-inch hole was blown right through its trunk.

Dracon beams!

I started to run. But something felt wrong. Marco! Where was he?

I turned and looked back. He was under the net! He was weighed down and crawling on his belly to get free of it.

I ran back.

TSEWWW! TSEWWW!

The Dracon beams, almost pale in the brilliant floodlit woods, fired again and again.

23 I grabbed the edge of the net in my jaws and lifted it up. It was shockingly heavy. No wonder Marco was crawling.

"Get out of here!" Marco yelled. "Don't get killed for me."

"Shut up and come on!" I cried.

TSEWWW! TSEWWW!

I couldn't hold the net. My jaws were aching. My neck was dragging down. Marco was barely inching forward. The Dracon beams were getting more and more accurate.

And now I saw where the guards had disappeared to. They were running through the woods toward us. Half a dozen men carrying automatic weapons. It was an eerie and terrifying sight, as the men cast gigantic shadows up into the tree-tops.

Then . . . something fast. Faster than a wolf. Faster than a human.

Like a deer. Like a horse. A mouthless face, eyes on stalks, a tail like a scorpion. A creature like nothing that lived on Earth. It raced straight for us.

"Ax!" I cried.

His tail struck, faster than a human eye could follow.

The tail blade made sparks as it sliced through the net, leaving a long gash just in front of Marco's nose.

"Yikes! That was a little close!" Marco said. But he surged through the hole in the net and took off. I was right behind him. Wolves are already fast. But when you get a scared wolf with a scared human mind inside it, you'd be amazed how that animal can move.

We hauled our butts out of there, with Ax right beside us.

BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM!

Gunfire! Good, old-fashioned, human, very deadly gunfire.

It's much louder in reality than it is in movies. And it's much scarier to have it aimed at you than it is to see it in a movie. Basically, getting shot at is absolutely nothing like a movie.

"Aaaaahhh!" I yelled.

"Aaaaahhh!" Marco yelled.

"Aaaaahhh!" Ax agreed.

Two wolves and an Andalite set a new record speeding away from that place.

24 Chapter Six

"Okay, I think we've answered the question about whether that's just an ordinary logging camp," Marco said.

We had reached the far edge of the forest, back close to my farm. Marco and I had demorphed. Rachel and Jake flew down and joined us. Tobias took up a perch on a low branch.

Ax stood nearby. His two stalk eyes moved continuously, side to side, peering into the dark woods around us. His two main eyes met my gaze.

"By the way, thanks, Ax," I said.

"Yeah, no kidding," Marco added. "I was Spam back there. That tail blade of yours is something."

"I should have spotted the nets up in the treetops," Ax berated himself.

"I had detected the force field and I suspected there were Dracon beams in the upper windows. But the nets were so primitive I overlooked them. "

Ax, like all Andalites, has no spoken speech. Probably because they have no mouths.

Thought-speak is his natural language.

Up close he looks like a cross between a deer or a horse, and a human and a scorpion. Sort of like a mythical centaur. His upper body is like a boy's. He has weak-looking arms and a head with two movable stalks on top, kind of like antlers. Each stalk has an eye. The eyes are constantly looking left and right and back.

Andalites are very hard to sneak up on.

His body is covered in blue and tan fur, very short on his humanoid torso, a bit longer on his deerlike body. His four hooves are sharp and black.

But it's the tail that grabs your attention. It's long enough that he can whip it up over his head and hit someone standing in front of him. It ends in a curved blade.

"None of us saw the nets," Jake pointed out. "They must have been well-concealed."

"The point is, they were waiting for us," Marco said. "This is definitely a Yeerk operation. I don't think they really want to go into the lumberjack business, which means this whole thing is about getting us."

"Agreed," Rachel said tersely. "They think we're Andalites. They know we've been hurting them all around this area. They've decided we must be hiding in these woods."

"They're almost right," Jake pointed out. "Ax and Tobias both do live in the forest. And we do use the forest."