I looked up and saw nothing. Then I noticed him swooping down toward me from the high branches of a tree.

"Tobias!" I yelled. I waved. Of course, he'd already seen me, obviously. But I was massively relieved. So I waved again. The red-tailed hawk body seemed almost bland, boring in the context of this jungle. He landed on a rotting, moss-encrusted log.

"Tobias! The others?"

"Everyone is alive." he said."It took a while to find everyone, though.I think the Bug fighter must have spun around a few times tearing through the trees. Cassie ended up practically on top of this snake. This extremely large snake."

"Where are we?"

"I don't know." Tobias said. "But I'm pretty sure this ain't home. Come on, follow me. It's not far."

I followed Tobias, pushing and shoving and fighting my way through forest that seemed determined to stop me. I was dripping with sweat and gasping in the thick air.

Then, a clearing. Not a natural clearing, but one created by the crashed Bug fighter.

"Jake!" Cassie yelled and ran over to give me a hug. She had a nasty cut on one hand, which she'd bandaged with strips torn from her T-shirt.

"You're alive," Marco observed. "For now," he added darkly.

"I told you he'd be okay," Rachel said.

The Bug fighter was upright, but one whole side looked as if it had been peeled back. You could see right to the inside.

The left engine pod was cranked out at a sharp angle.

Ax was inside the fighter. He lowered his head to peer at me through the hole in the fighter's side.

"Prince Jake. I'm glad you're all right."

"I'm glad I'm all right, too," I said. "Now . . . where are we?"

"Where is easy," Cassie said. "Rain forest. Not Africa, because I've seen monkeys with prehensile tails. You know, tails they can swing by. Most likely, we're in Central or South America. Either the Costa Rican rain forest, or the Amazon rain forest."

"I'm betting Amazon," Marco said brightly. "I'm also taking bets on whether we live long enough for me to collect on bets."

I laughed. "You're always such an optimist, Marco."

I turned back to Cassie. "Amazon rain forest, huh?"

"Like I said, the question of where we are is fairly easy."

"Cassie, why do I have the feeling there's something you're not telling me?" I asked her.

"Remember when we were in orbit? Remember how it was night in North America, but the sun was just coming up over the Red Sea?"

I shrugged. "I guess so."

"Well, after we fired at the Blade ship, as we were going down it was daylight here. Over South America."

It took me a few seconds to realize what she was talking about.

Ax came trotting out of the Bug fighter. He wiped his hands on a rag. " Thanks to Cassie's observation, it seems pretty clear that when we and the Blade ship fired simultaneously and the Dracon beams intersected, we created what we call a Sario Rip."

"A what? A Sario Rip? What's that?"

"We blew a small hole in space-time. And were drawn in through that hole."

"English, please," I warned. "Plain English, please."

"We were blown through time, Jake," Cassie said. "We aren't Where we want to be. And we aren't when we want to be."

I stared at her. "Did we go forward or back? Are we in the past or the future?"

"Yes." Ax said."It's definitely one of those two choices."

1:22 p.m.

Again.

So let me just summarize here. We are probably in the Amazon rain forest. And we are either in our own past, or in our own

future. We have no way to fly this Bug fighter out of here. We have no way of knowing if there's a city or town or even a road near here." I looked around at my friends. "Anyone have anything to add?"

"I know that it is one twenty-two p.m.." Ax said. "I just don't know what day or year it is."

Andalites have the ability to keep track of time naturally.

Like some kind of internal clock. It's useful. Of course, it's more useful if you know what century you're in.

Cassie held up her hand, like she was in school. "The rain forest is full of poisonous snakes, poisonous insects, poisonous plants, and poisonous frogs."

"Excuse me?" Marco said. "Poisonous frogs? Did you say poisonous frogs?"

"Plus, there is at least one large predator, the jaguar."

"Love their cars," Marco said.

"Right now we have no food and no water,"

Rachel added helpfully. "Also, no weapons."

"Why do we need weapons?" Tobias asked. "Morph into birds and we'll just fly out of here."

"None of us can stay in morph for more than two hours," Cassie pointed out. "Realistically, we can't fly more than twenty or thirty miles an hour at best. That's maybe sixty miles per morph. And we could be a thousand miles from nowhere."

"Besides," Marco said glumly. "What are we supposed to do?

Find a town, make a collect call to our families and tell them we're in South America? "Hey, Dad, guess what? I'm in Brazil.

Or maybe Costa Rica. Could you come pick me up?"'"

"If there even is a town," Rachel said. "If there even are phones. If our parents have been born yet, or are still alive.

You're kind of missing something we may be in the year two thousand b.c. Or... we might be in the year ten thousand a.d."

"Ax, what's the deal with this Sario Rip?" I asked the Andalite. "I mean, is there some way to undo it?"

Ax didn't answer. Instead, I noticed his stalk eyes turning slowly to his right. "We are not alone." Ax said.

I shot a glance in the direction Ax was looking. Something moved! I had a fleeting impression of a shoulder, arm, and head.

"Humanoid." Ax said. "I didn't see it very well. But it was watching us."

"Swell," I said. "Tobias?"

"I'm on it." he said, opening his wings and flapping away through the trees. "As for the Sario Rip, I... all I know is what it is. It's a rip in space-time."

"Yeah, you told us that," Marco said.

"I think . . ." Ax hung his head. "Prince Jake, we studied the Sario Rip effect in school. But there was a game later that day. And I was thinking more about the game than class. Also, there was this female who distracted me."

Marco laughed. "Ax, are you telling us you were too busy flirting with some girl to pay attention to the lesson?"

Ax didn't answer. He just said, "I don't exactly know whether you can reverse a Sario Rip. I remember some things, but not everything."

"I'm thirsty," Rachel said. "Whatever else we're going to do, we have to find water. And food. Ax, can we fix the Bug fighter?"

"We can fly with just one engine." Ax said. "The ripped skin of the craft is irrelevant as long as we stay in the atmosphere and fly slow. But the effects of the Sario Rip have wiped out the ship's software. It's been erased."

"Can you rewrite the software?" Rachel asked.

"Yes. But it would take me twenty years, atleast."

"Better and better," I said. "Hey. Wait. What happened to the Blade ship?"

Ax looked blank.

"I saw it going down along with us," Cassie said. "But I didn't see it crash."