"Is there any way to see through this holo gram?" Cassie asked.

"We could hit him with something as big as a bus," Rachel suggested.

"Now, there's a classic Rachel suggestion," I said with a laugh. I was feeling better, hanging with my friends.

"Marco found out The Sharing is having a lit tle waterskiing thing up at the lake," Jake said.

He bit his lip and added, "Tom told him. Erek is in The Sharing. He'll probably be there, too.

Per fect chance for us to get a good look at him.

That's the 'where." Now we just need the "how.""

Ax thought for a moment as we ambled through the woods. "The hologram is meant to trick humans. It would be tuned for human sight.

Hawk eyes are better than human, but still see similar wavelengths of light. Maybe a totally dif ferent sort of vision would be able to penetrate the hologram."

My heart sank. I knew what was coming next.

Some gross morph.

"Unusual vision is our specialty,"

Rachel said with a careless laugh. She slapped me on the back like life was just one big adventure.

Sometimes Rachel really grinds my nerves.

"No bugs, okay?" I said. "All I'm saying is, no more insect morphs. Is that too much to ask?"

J. guess it was too much to ask, as I found out a couple days later.

"What do you mean, we're going to draw straws?"

I asked suspiciously.

"To see who morphs our new morph," Rachel said. "Ax is in, regardless. We need his expertise in aliens. One of us has to go in with him."

"What's the morph?" I asked suspiciously.

"Spider," Cassie said.

We were at Cassie's barn. It was Saturday morning. On Friday I'd found out I'd gotten a B on my English paper. How cool is that? I'd stayed up watching TV with my dad and been late for this meeting.

This was the kind of insanity they cooked up when I wasn't there.

"Excuse me? I must have something wrong with my ears." I tapped the side of my head with my palm. "Because, see, I thought I heard you say the word "spider." And I remember saying "no insects.""

Cassie held her hand out to me. And in that hand was a spider. "It's not an insect. Arachnids have eight legs and two body segments. Insects have six legs and three segments."

I swear, I took a look at that spider and almost passed out.

"Since I knew we were doing this today, I decided to do some reading. This is a wolf spider. It has pretty good eyesight. In fact, it has eight eyes."

Cassie said this like having eight eyes was a good thing. Like eight eyes was something everyone should want.

"Go away, Cassie. Go away. Go away, go away, I am going to morph a spider! You can morph a spider. I don't like spiders."

Jake gave me a look. "Marco, Cassie always gets stuck doing the new morphs. Besides, this is more your mission than anyone else's."

"What? Why?" I demanded angrily. "Why is this my mission more than yours or Rachel's?"

Jake shrugged. "Erek is your friend."

"My friend? When did I ever say he was my friend? He's not my friend. I barely know the guy!"

"Marco, you're such a wuss," Rachel said.

"Hey, you want to be a spider?"

Rachel shuddered slightly. "Sure." She was lying. I just knew it. "If I draw the short straw, I'd love to go spider."

Then she grinned. She couldn't keep a straight face.

"Look, you don't have to do this," Jake said. "It's just that we're going to be infiltrating a meeting of The Sharing. The Yeerks are totally on alert for animal morphs.

We have to fit into the environment of the lake. Whatever morphs we use have to belong there. We can't be showing up there as lions and tigers and bears."

"Oh, my," Cassie interjected.

"We need good vision, but not standard mammal-type eyes. And we can't all go in the same way. I want two people to hang back as a rescue squad in case we get into a mess. Ax has to go because we need him to see if he can figure out what Erek is. Ax is going in as a spider, and we need someone to go with him."

"Has anyone told Ax about this?"

"He was here earlier. While you were sleeping in late. He said he thought a spider's body was much more sensible than a human's body,"

Cassie said. "His exact words were, "Ah, good. With eight legs it won't fall over like a human.""

"Be glad we waited for you at all," Rachel growled. "Just draw a straw."

Jake had five pieces of hay in his fist.

There was no way to tell which was the shortest one.

"Hah. I know how to beat this," I said.

"It's mathematical. If I choose first, my odds are just one in five. The next person to choose has odds of one in four, then one in three, and so on. So the safest thing to do is choose first."

I took a deep breath, reached out, and yanked up a straw.

I took another deep breath and looked at the very short straw. "Really, it made perfect sense mathematically," I said.

I felt like crying.

Rachel rolled her eyes. "You know, if you're going to be a big baby, I'll do it."

I should have just said "okay." That's what I should have said. What I did say to Rachel was, "Don't condescend to me, oh mighty Xena.

Just because I'm not a reckless idiot doesn't mean I'm a wuss. I've never chickened out on a morph yet. And if Ax is in, so am I. You can hang around and be the backup, Rachel. I'm going where the action is."

To which Rachel replied with a very calm, "Okay."

See, this is why guys and girls should not be in combat together. Because it's much harder for a guy to be a coward when some girl is watching. Especially when she's all gung ho. If it had just been Jake and Tobias, I'd have been weeping and groveling on the ground.

Cassie held out the spider. "It's not bad,"

she said. "I morphed the spider yesterday, just to see what it was like.

Charlotte's Web was one of my favorite books."

"It would be," I muttered. Well, that was the clincher. Rachel was ready to go, and Cassie had already done it.

I reached out a finger to touch the spider. It was shaking. My finger, not the spider.

I touched the spider's back. It tried to get away but Cassie closed her hand around the spider and the tip of my finger.

The spider became very still as I acquired it.

Thanks to the Andalite technology that had transformed me, the spider DNA entered my system.

Maybe the Yeerks were right. Maybe the An-dalites were just the big meddlers of the universe.

I know one thing: At that moment, as I touched the spider's bristly body, I really wished the Andalites had found someone else to give this power to.

lake is in the mountains. It's a long way from where any of us live. And if we'd had to walk it would have taken several days. Fortunately, we didn't have to walk.

We have our own little airline. TWA: Travel With Animorphs.

It was a beautiful day. Just a few puffy clouds in a blue sky. Bright sun. A canopy of trees spread out beneath us as we flew toward the mountains.

With my osprey wings spread wide and the sun toasting the ground so it sent up elevators of warm air, it was as perfect as life can get.

If you overlooked the fact that we were head- ing toward utter, unspeakable grossness and certain destruction.

"Time to split up."

Tobias said. "The lake is just over that next ridge."

We had not been flying close together because that would have looked massively suspicious. Two ospreys, a harrier, a bald eagle, a peregrine, and a red-tailed hawk, all flying together? Not in the natural world. But we were all within a mile of each other, and all heading in the same direction.