"Ax? Did you have any problems with the monkey's mind when you morphed?" Cassie asked.

"No. Except . . . well, they are similar to morphing a human, but much more excitable. Also, they don't fall over as easily as humans do."

Ax is constantly amazed that humans walk around on just two legs, without even a tail to hold us up.

"Okay, let's do it," I said. "We're short on time, and we are exposed, sitting out here looking like dumb, barefoot kids from the suburbs. Tobias? Ax? Both of you keep an eye out for any trouble."

"This whole rain forest is nothing but trouble" Tobias said darkly. "Especially when you're a red-tailed hawk and you stick out like a sore thumb."

He was right, but I had to worry about one thing at a time.

And I knew from my "visions" that we could successfully morph into monkeys. Unfortunately, the visions didn't tell me whether we'd succeed or fail, end up alive ... or not.

I concentrated on a mental image of the monkey. And very, very quickly, I began to feel the changes.

The real monkeys began to see the changes, too.

SQUEEE SQUEEE! SQUEEE!

The real monkeys leaped onto the tree trunk and scampered up toward the high branches.

I shrank. That was to be expected. But the more I shrank, the more vulnerable I felt. Brown fur sprouted from my arms and legs. My face remained furless, and my lips puffed out to form a rubbery muzzle. The largest single change was the tail. I felt it come shooting out from the base of my spine. But I'd had a tail before, so I didn't think much about it.

Then I realized something. The tail moved. Not just back and forth, like a dog's tail. It moved like a fifth arm.

"Hey, the tail is neat." Cassie said. "Try moving it. You can feel that there's a part of your brain that controls it. Just like an extra hand."

She was right. And Ax was right, too. There was very little that was new or strange inside the monkey's mind. Like a human, it had only a few basic instincts. Like a human, it depended on learning to guide its actions.

The eyes were similar to human eyes. The ears no better than our own. The sense of smell was a bit improved, though.

"That was an easy morph." Rachel said. "So. What can this monkey do?"

I shrugged my narrow monkey shoulders.

"I guess it climbs trees."

I turned to the tree trunk. Like almost all the rain forest trees, it was shockingly tall. And there were no low branches.

But there were strangling vines wrapped all around the trunk, like a nest of snakes.

"Let's try it out." I said. I reached for a vine and held it tentatively. I positioned one foot. Then I carefully reached for another handhold.

"Prince Jake." Ax said. "Let the creature do the climbing. It knows how. Like this."

He put the Bug fighter's computer in his mouth and leaped right through the air, snatched a handhold, and was fifty feet up the tree before I could blink three times.

I took a deep breath and relaxed my control. I allowed the monkey mind to come forward and just said, "Climb."

Ax was right. The monkey knew how to climb. You know the way Michael Jordan knows his way around a basketball court? Or the way Kristi Ya-maguchi knows her way around the ice rink?

That's how the monkey knew the trees. It knew the trees. It understood the trees. It was born to be in the trees.

Hands, toes, hands, toes, it found every little handhold, every foothold, never a hesitation, never a doubt, never a question. That monkey knew exactly, precisely what to do.

I felt like I had swallowed ten Mountain Dews and a box of Ring-Dings. I was tiny, but man, I had energy. I flew up that tree.

I met Cassie up in the high canopy.

"Yow! Ax was right. This monkey can climb trees!"

"That's not all it can do." she said. The others were just catching up to us. "Watch this."

She launched herself out into the air. We were fifty feet up, easy, as high as a five-story building, and Cassie just fired her hind legs and flew through the air.

She snatched a hanging vine with one hand, but never stopped swinging forward.

That was all I needed to see. It was a game of chase through the treetops. The monkey wanted to play, and so did I. I needed some fun. to needed some fun in the worst way.

I leaped. For about two seconds that felt like ten minutes, I hung in the air. Then, my left hand simply reached out, found a branch, swung me forward, launched me once again through the air, reached out again . . .

Swing and fly and grab and swing and fly and grab!

"0h, yes! Oh, definitely!" Marco exulted as he followed Cassie and me through the trees.

Swing! Flyyyyy! Catch! Swing! Flyyyyy! Catch!

The little monkey brain processed every move, prepared every action and reaction. The entire world was branches and vines to the monkey.

Swing! Fly through the air with the ground a deadly fifty feet down! Catch at the last possible second! Swing again, out into the void, catch just in time to save your life!

It was the scene from my flash. Me, zipping through the trees.

Ax paused to let us all catch up. He wrapped his tail around a branch and hung there, panting. I wrapped my own tail around the branch and let go with my hands and feet. I hung there, high above the forest floor, by my tail. I swayed gently in the breeze.

"This sounds weird, but there's something . . . familiar about this." I said to Cassie when she caught up to us. "I mean, not to the monkey, but to me. To me, the human."

"It's called brachiating, I think." Cassie said. "Swinging through the trees. It's what our distant ancestors did, millions of years ago. Maybe little bits of that memory are still stuck in the back of our human brains. Maybe all the stages of evolution are still a part of us."

"0r maybe it just reminds me of playing on jungle gyms when I was a little kid."

"0h, sure, if you want the boring, obvious explanation" Cassie said with a laugh.

"It's like gymnastics." Rachel said. "0nly this monkey could totally destroy any human on the uneven parallel bars. If the monkey team could be in the Olympics, they'd win every medal."

"Can I ask a question?" Ax interrupted. "Where are we going?"

We all stared at him. Then we burst out laughing. The monkey bodies laughed, too, a wild, chittering sound. That just made us laugh all the more.

"I guess we did get kind of carried away." I said to Ax. "Now get serious. We have stuff to do. We have to find the Blade ship. And we have to get back to our own time before eight fifty-four."

"Can we play chase some more first?" Marco asked.

And I would have said yes, because I was as caught up as he was in the idiot joy of being a monkey.

But right then, I saw down below us a troop of Hork-Bajir.

Five of them, slashing their way through the undergrowth with a human-Controller following along behind.

"Let's follow them." I said. "Sooner or later they'll head back for the Blade ship, right?"

I don't think I ever realized how strong Hork-Bajir are till we followed them as they rampaged through the rain forest.

They used their arm blades to slash at the vegetation, leaving a path of destruction in their wake. They slashed and slashed and never seemed to tire.

There was a human-Controller with them. A guy who looked like he might be nineteen or twenty. He was in good shape, but he was gasping and sweating and struggling to keep up with the powerful, tireless Hork-Bajir. Far above them we swung and flew and caught and swung again.