I don't even know what I felt. Just that that moment, that very moment, was terribly important. The others all stared at me, waiting. All I had to say was, "Let's go."

Instead, I looked at my watch. Eight-nineteen. Eight-nineteen.

Like it meant something. Like . . .

Oh, man, I was going nuts! I was losing it. What was the matter with me?

"Should we do this?" I wondered. I was surprised to realize I'd spoken out loud. I'd been talking to myself.

"Why not? I say we do it," Rachel said.

"There's a huge shock," Marco muttered. "Everyone who is surprised Rachel wants to go for it, raise your hand."

"Yeah," I said, shaking off my doubts as well as I could.

"Yeah, let's go."

I was pretty sure it was the right thing to do, but the responsibility was on me. I could have stopped it. I could have talked them all out of it. I could have done something different.

But I didn't. At least not then . . .

"Let's morph," I said.

Let's hope no one has a can of Raid," Marco said.

I tried to laugh. But I hate morphing bugs.

Back when we started morphing, I figured we'd morph things like lions and bears and eagles. And we do. But we also morph things a lot smaller. The insect world is very useful.

Sometimes smaller is better.

That never exactly makes it fun, though. There is no nightmare, no horror movie, no weird psycho vision as scary as actually turning into a cockroach or a spider or a flea or a fly.

When you morph a tiger, you still have four limbs. You have two eyes. You have a mouth. You have bones and a stomach and lungs and teeth. Maybe they're all different, but they're all still there.

The change to a fly is nothing like becoming a tiger. Nothing is where it should be. Nothing stays the same.

The problem with morphs is that they are never exactly the same twice in a row. And the changes happen in bizarre, unpredictable ways. It's not smooth. It's not logical. It's not gradual.

I started to shrink, but when I was still almost entirely human, still probably three feet tall, I felt my skin harden.

See, flies don't have bones. They have an exoskeleton. Their outer shell is what holds them together in one piece. And my exoskeleton was growing. My soft, human skin was being replaced by something dark, something hard as plastic.

My body was squeezed into segments. Insect segments: a head, a thorax, an abdomen.

And when I was still at least two feet tall, way too tall to be anything like a fly, the extra legs came bursting, squishing, slurping out of what had been my chest.

My own true legs collapsed as they shriveled down to match my new fly legs. I fell forward into the dirt. Facedown. Not that I had much of a face anymore.

My proboscis had already begun to form from my melting mouth and lips and nose and tongue. The proboscis was as big as my fly legs - a long, retractable, hollow tube. Flies eat with the proboscis. They spit saliva all over the food, wait till it gets mushy, then suck it up. It isn't pretty. But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was the eyes. I still had semi human vision when I saw Cassie, lying in the dirt beside me, suddenly grow fly eyes. They popped out of her human eyes.

Popped out, huge and devoid of soul. Big, black balloons that sort of inflated out of her own eye sockets. That's a sight that will make you heave up your lunch.

My own vision went dark then. I was blind for a couple of seconds, then yow! The fly eyes turned on, and the whole world was different. How can I explain what it's like to look through compound eyes? It's like you're watching a thousand tiny TV sets all at once. A thousand tiny TV sets, all clustered together. And each set has really weird color. Like someone twisted all the color knobs. Yellow is purple, green is red, blue is black. It's insane. Like some disturbed kid got loose with a Crayola box and colored in everything with different colors. But what's awful is the way the eyes look in all directions at once. I could see the tube, that was now my mouth, sticking out in front of me. I could see my own twig legs. I could see the stiff hairs poking out of my armored body.

Still, there is one good thing about being a fly -- if you can get past the screaming horror of it. Part of what I could see was the pair of gossamer wings that sprouted from what should have been my back.

Flies can fly.

Man, can they fly.

"Everyone okay?" I asked.

"Aside from the fact I make myself sick? Yes." Marco said.

Then . . . PAH-LOOOSH!

An explosion on the ground ahead of me. The dirt just seemed to blow up. Like a mortar explosion.

"What the . . ." Rachel yelped.

PAH-LOOOSH!

"It's starting to rain, guys." Tobias informed us calmly.

The explosions of mortar shells were just big, fat raindrops hitting the dirt.

"Jeez! I thought someone was trying to kill u." Cassie said.

"Let's get on with th." I said.

I fired the springs in my legs and turned on my wings. I was airborne instantly. It's not like being a bird. A bird has to really work at flying.

For a fly, it's automatic.

Instantaneous. You think let's fly and a split second later you're zooming crazily through the air.

Across the weird mass of tiny TV sets I could see the others rise up from the ground. They flew like pigs. Like big fat balls with these tiny little wings that looked like they couldn't lift a speck of dust. But, like I said before, flies can fly. I zoomed Wildly upward. Like a wallowing rocket!

"Hah-Hah! Oh, man!" Rachel exulted. "I'd forgotten how great this was!"

"Disgusting, but oh yeah, these things can haul." Marco agreed. "Tobias, you only think you can fly. You haven't flown till you've flown Maggot Airways."

"Maybe" Tobias said calmly. "And, not to burst your balloon, but you guys are all heading the wrong way."

"We are?"

"Yes. You're heading toward a Dumpster." Tobias said with a laugh. "Turn left. Turn left and get some altitude. Then you should be able to see the car lights on the road."

I would have smiled if I'd had a mouth. The fly brain had been easy to control because we'd already done this morph before.

But the fly's instincts still had some input. See, the fly smelled rotting food in the Dumpster and it knew right where it wanted to go. We followed Tobias's directions. I rocketed higher, and then . . .

"Whoa! Whoa! What is that? Are those cars?" Cassie demanded.

"These eyes are seeing ultraviolet light." Ax commented.

"They're seeing something, that's for sure." I agreed.

The cars racing past were not cars so much as they were glowing, red-and-purple meteors. The road was a blur of movement, all of it strange and disturbing to the fly brain.

"Stay above the cars." Tobias warned.

"Why?" Ax asked.

"A little something we call windshields." Tobias said dryly.

"A windshield moving sixty miles an hour is death to bugs."

"Good point." I agreed.

"Going higher." I powered my wings and bobbed and weaved and rolled higher and higher. But the fly inside my head didn't like it. He lived close to the ground. The ground was where you found food. And food was all the fly brain cared about.

"It's starting to rain harder." Tobias said.

I began to notice more drops. They were sparkling meteorites, each three times my own size. They plummeted around me. But in my fly scale of things they were fairly far apart. Then . . .

more rain. Closer together. Falling thick and fast all around me.