"Are these guys going somewhere, or just wandering around?"

Rachel grumbled. "Tick-tock, ticktock. We're running out of time."

"There! There!" the human-Controller rasped weakly, pointing in the direction of the base of the tree we were in. "That animal! That piglike thing, I don't think it belongs here."

I think the guy was just tired. Looking for an excuse to sit down and rest. But without pausing even to consider, the lead Hork-Bajir drew his Dracon beam and fired.

TSEEEWWW!

The wild pig, or whatever it was, sizzled and disappeared. The Dracon beam kept traveling. It hit and sliced through the trunk of our tree.

"Move!" I yelled as the tree began to shudder and sway.

We leaped wildly for the next tree. I fired myself out into the air. The tree was falling too fast. No time to plan a landing!

I flew through the air for a very, very long two seconds. I dropped. The ground came rushing up. I could see the face of the human-Controller staring up at me, wondering . . .

A branch! I reached. Missed!

No, wait! Suddenly I was stopping, swinging in a crazy circle.

I almost laughed when I realized what had happened. My tail had grabbed the branch my hand had missed.

"I don't like that monkey," the human-Controller said.

The Hork-Bajir leader once again drew his Dracon beam and aimed for me.

But I was out of there. I raced back along the branch, holding on with my toes. And I swung around the back of the trunk a split second ahead of...

TSEEWWW!

ZZZZAAAPPP! The tree trunk exploded right in front of me as the Dracon beam turned its sap to steam. Heat scorched my face. I lost my hold and began to fail.

Then ... a hand grabbed me.

"Hold on!" Rachel said as she swung me toward a new branch.

"That does it! That's no real monkey," the human-Controller yelled. "The monkeys! Kill all the monkeys! Kill every monkey you see!"

Five Hork-Bajir drew their weapons.

"No!" Cassie cried. "Jake! We have to stop them!"

"Cassie, get out of here!Go!" I yelled.

TSEEEWWW! TSEEEWWW! TSEEEWWW!

Dracon beams fired their killing light. Tree branches fell away like someone was trimming a rosebush. And one of the beams hit a monkey.

"Cassie! Marco! Ax!" I yelled.

"It wasn't one of us." Marco answered.

Monkeys were destroyed. Birds in the trees were destroyed. A sloth and its baby, hanging from a branch, were destroyed. The Hork-Bajir were on a rampage. They were past just shooting at monkeys. They were shooting at anything that moved in the high branches.

"They're killing everything!" Cassie cried, outraged. "We have to stop them!"

"This isn't time to play save-the-rain-forest, Cassie." Marco snapped. "This is time to play save your own butt!"

"Jake!" Tobias yelled down from above. "I see Dracon beams being fired!"

"Yeah, we kind of noticed." Rachel answered.

We had swung away from most of the slaughter. But we were still near enough to hear the wild, huffing laughter of the Hork-Bajir and the giddy, insane cries from the human- Controller.

I know there is a difference between human life and the lives of other animals. I mean, I guess there is. And I definitely know there is a difference between human life and the lives of trees. But still, that mindless, pointless massacre of trees and the animals in them made me sick.

The Hork-Bajir were just cutting everything down. Smoldering stumps stood where trees had been sliced up. The forest was screaming in anger and confusion.

HOO! HOOO! HOOHOOHOO!

Ke-Raw! Ke-Raw! Ke-Raw!

Then something strange happened.

As the Hork-Bajir stomped on through the rain forest, something fell from a tree. It was very long, and it wrapped itself around the lead Hork-Bajir.

"A snake!" Rachel yelled.

"Man, I didn't know snakes came that big!" Marco said.

The snake swiftly coiled around the Hork-Bajir and squeezed.

The other Hork-Bajir began to slash at it. Then . . .

"Get back, fools, and be glad I don't kill you all." a sneering, thought-speak voice said.

The Hork-Bajir stopped trying to free their trapped friend very suddenly. They stepped back. And just watched the struggling Hork-Bajir.

I knew that thought-speak voice. We all did. Somehow the sound of it in your brain made you feel afraid.

Once the Hork-Bajir stopped struggling, the snake began to change. From the impossibly long snake body, an Andalite grew.

An Andalite body, at least. But not a true Andalite. Because in that Andalite head lived the Yeerk slug who held the rank of Visser Three.

It's strange, how two almost identical things can be so totally different. See, Visser Three looked almost exactly like Ax, or any other Andalite. And yet, there was never a moment of doubt when you saw him that this was an evil creature.

The four remaining Hork-Bajir and the human-Controller were shaking with terror before the Visser.

"What are you fools doing?" the Visser asked in deceptively calm tones. He looked at the human-Controller.

Visser Three is never very careful about his thought-speak.

Thought-speak is like E-mail: You can decide who it goes to.

Or you can just blast it out for all to hear. I guess if you're as powerful as Visser Three, you just shout away.

The human-Controller turned several shades lighter than his natural color. "We... we... we we we were following your orders, Visser. To destroy any animals that don't belong here because they could be the Andalite bandits."

"And you thought perhaps the trees were Andalites, as well?"

"No ... it was . . . urn . . ."

The Visser raked his Andalite tail forward and pressed the blade against the man's throat.

"Did it occur to you that the Bug fighter is less than a hundred yards from here? Did it occur to you that Dracon beams travel a long way? Did it occur to you that we cannot get back to our own time without that Bug fighter? And did it occur to you that I MIGHT BE IN MORPH and that you might end up shooting me?"

The human-Controller sank to his knees. "I didn't... we never... it... it... was them!" He pointed a finger of blame at the Hork-Bajir.

I whispered to Ax. "What's that about needing the Bug fighter to get back to his own time?"

Ax shrugged his monkey shoulders.

"I don't know. I think . . . maybe we need to exactly recreate the intersection of the two Dracon beams to undo the Sario Rip. I remember something like that from school." He held up the little disk from the Bug fighter's computer. "But they can't fly the Bug fighter without this."

It came to me then, in a flash of insight: I had made a terrible mistake. I had risked Ax's life to get the computer, to make it impossible for the Yeerks to fly the Bug fighter.

But now, we knew they'd have to fly the Bug fighter to get us home.

You could say we had a bargaining chip. You'd think maybe we could trade Visser Three the computer for a ride home. But I knew better. Once he had the computer, the Visser would just kill us.

We were trapped. Trapped, because of my own mistake.

We had been in monkey morph for almost the two-hour limit. It was time to change and regroup, and hopefully figure out what to do next.

We swung away through the trees, far from Visser Three. We scampered down to the ground and began to demorph.

Tobias flew up and landed on a fallen tree beside us, since there were no low branches. There was a black, singed area on his tail.

"Tobias!" Cassie cried. She rushed over to him as soon as she was human again.