Gray feathers, mostly.

I glared at Marco with my incredible Force-10 falcon vision.

He glared back with the eyes of an osprey. "Let's catch some air."I said.

I flapped my wings twice and hopped up to the windowsill.

"Last time I was in osprey morph some peregrine took a shot at me." Marco said. He sounded a little resentful. Like it was my fault. He hopped up to the sill beside me.

"Don't worry, Marco. I'll protect you." I said it knowing it would make him mad. "Protect me? Right. Come on, big guy, let's fly.

See if you can keep up with me first. Then see if you can "protect" me. Hah!"

I opened my wings wide, kicked off from the windowsill, and dropped straight for the grass in Marco's backyard. This is always terrifying. See, you know you're a bird and all, but in your mind you're still a human. And jumping out of windows scares humans. I was ten, twelve feet off the ground, with nothing but lawn to catch me if for some reason my wings didn't work. But then my wings caught the air. I felt the pressure of the air pushing up beneath me. I flapped hard, one, two, three, four, and shot for ward. Forward and upward.

I flapped and flapped, working hard to get al titude in the cool air. Flapping is hard. Just be cause you're a bird doesn't mean flapping is easy. Marco and I had just managed to climb maybe fifty feet when Tobias came zooming up alongside us, zipping around like he'd been born a bird.

"Follow me." he said.

"Follow you where?" I asked, maybe a little too grouchily.

Tobias laughed. "We're going to the grocery store." he said.

"We're going to the Safeway."

"Tobias, are you nuts?" Marco demanded. "The grocery store?

What, is there a sale on gourmet birdseed?"

"Funny, Marco." Tobias said. "But it's not about birdseed.

This grocery store seems to be having a sale on high-ranking Controllers."

Lt's hard to be worried when you're flying. You feel so powerful, floating high above the heads of all the little people below you. People are so slow. They walk in little lines along side walks, always stuck moving in two dimensions: left-right, forward-back. A bird moves in three dimensions and has a lot more going on when he's flying. There's the air temperature, the speed of wind gusts, the steadiness of the breeze crosswinds and thermals and humidity.

Your wings and tail are constantly adjusting -- extending your wingtips, spreading or narrowing your tail, altering the angle of attack.

Fortunately, the falcon's brain handles all of that. Because let's face it, as a human, I know basically nothing about flying.

All I know is it's the coolest thing in the entire world.

Marco and I flew along with Tobias till we spotted two other big birds of prey rising up toward us: Rachel and Cassie.

"Break it up all." Tobias advised. "We're going to draw every bird-watcher within a hundred miles. Spread out. Stop thinking like humans -- we don't have to be bunched together to see the same things."

He was right. Falcons, hawks, and eagles don't exactly fly in flocks together. And with the intense vision of our bird morphs, we could see whatever we were supposed to see from a quarter of a mile away.

I wanted to get altitude because I was struggling with the dead air around me. I had the narrowest wings of the group. I was brutally fast in a killing dive, much faster than the others. But at the business of endlessly riding wisps of breeze I was weak.

I split off from Marco, circled to the right, and kept my laser-focus eyes on Tobias, careful to stay within thought- speak range. "0kay, this is it." Tobias said. "See the big car lot down there? Track left a block."

I was catching my first decent breeze, so I soared upward as I searched the ground below. Then I saw it. "Left of the car lot ... that's a grocery store, right?" I asked. I was puzzled.

From the air, almost every building just looks like a big rectangle. "lt looks like they had some kind of fire."

"Yep. Now, look closer." Tobias advised. "See the plastic sheet across the left side of the store? Look how the breeze blows it in. See?"

"lt looks like the entire left wall was knocked in or something." Rachel said. She was a bald eagle, riding high above me and further west.

"Exactly." Tobias said. "Now, see the parking lot on that side? See the marks?"

I did. There were several long gouges torn in the blacktop.

Long, straight gouges, in perfect alignment, pointing right toward the busted wall of the grocery store. A couple dozen workmen seemed to be on the ground, rushing around to erect a plywood wall to conceal the hole. Suddenly, I realized. I guess Marco did, too.

"0h, man." Marco said. "0h, man."

"You'd never notice it from ground level." Tobias said smugly.

"But from the bird's-eye view, it's pretty obvious."

"Something hit the ground. It was moving fast. It skidded across the grocery store parking lot, hit the wall, plowed inside, and started a fire." I said.

"Exactamundo." Tobias said. "It must have happened late at night."

Cassie pointed out. "0therwise there would have been cars in the parking lot."

"You still haven't seen the best thing yet." Tobias said.

"Take a run, one at a time, over the site. Check out who's in charge of the cleanup crew."

I flapped hard, turned, flapped harder, and shot over the smoke-scarred grocery store. I only caught a glimpse of the man who was directing the work crew. I couldn't quite believe what I saw.

"Chapman?" I asked.

"Chapman." Tobias confirmed. "He's been here all day."

Chapman is the assistant principal at our school. He's also a high-ranking Controller-a very important part of the Yeerk invasion.

"Why is the assistant principal from our school suddenly working construction?" Cassie asked, adding, "As if I couldn't guess."

"Whatever this is, it must be important." Rachel said.

"They're working fast. And look! That guy there with the long coat? Up on the roof? I just caught a flash of a machine gun under his coat."

There were six or seven men and women on the roof of the store. They were looking around with the kind of steely, paranoid gaze you see on the faces of the President's Secret Service guys.

"They're nervous." Cassie agreed. "Scared, even. You cannot see from the way they move. The way they act. Someone screwed something up big time, and everyone down there is very afraid."

"So? What do we do, oh fearless leader?" Marco asked. He was asking me. The others like to act as if I'm in charge. I don't think of myself that way, not really. But you know, whatever.

If it makes them feel better to think I'm the leader, fine.

It's just that when people treat you like a leader, you start acting like a leader. And like I said, that means making decisions. Even when you're just guessing.

"Yeah, what's the plan?" Rachel asked.

FLASH!

Right in my face!

Big, glittering eyes, the only things shining in the darkness.

A muzzle open just enough to show long, curved fangs. The face of an extremely big cat. Mountain lion? Leopard?

In a second it would lunge, open its jaws wide and - FLASH!

"Whoa!" I yelled.

"What's the matter? Do you see something?" Tobias asked.

"Jake? I asked you, what's the plan?" Rachel said, sound ing annoyed.