They argued on for a while, and, not for the first time, I realized my life had gotten weird. I was flying a mile up, listening to a thought-speak debate between a bald eagle and an osprey over the existence of aliens.

Good grief.

After a while I tuned them out. It is very quiet in the high air. No noise from the ground. None. Sometimes you hear the engines of a jet flying by, five miles farther up. But mostly all you hear is the soft rushing of wind over feathers. And the sound of your own wings beating.

We used the altitude of the first thermal to jump from thermal to thermal.

We would fly out of one gentle vortex of warm air, descend to the next, and let it raise us up again.

And after a while, I saw the roads becoming fewer and smaller. The houses thinned out. The gas stations were miles apart. I saw cows and sheep standing around in random patterns far below.

And then even the cows and sheep were left behind as were the last homes and businesses. Below us the ground was dry, covered with yel- lowed grass, and marked out by barbed-wire fences.

Tobias said, "Hey. Check out that sign down there. The one by the dirt road." I aimed my osprey vision and read: STOP!

GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. RESTRICTED AREA.

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

ALL OTHERS ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST AND PROSECUTION. THIS MEANS YOU.

"l'm guessing this is the beginning of the famous Zone Ninety-one," I said.

"Friendly, aren't they?" Rachel said.

"lf you were trying to conceal a vast government conspiracy to hide an alien spacecraft, you'd be paranoid, too," Marco said.

I wasn't sure whether he was joking or not. Sometimes it's hard to tell with Marco.

I could see the base called Zone 91. It was a cluster of squat, unattractive buildings that all looked as if they'd been built forty years ago. There were three very large buildings that looked like aircraft hangars. And there was an airstrip. But I could also see lots of vehicles: trucks, Humvees, even some tanks.

And there were horses, just scattering, sauntering through the base like it wasn't there.

"Marco, I know a lady you'd love," Rachel muttered. "Her name is Crazy Helen. Crazy, because she sounds like you."

"Let's look for those horses," I suggested. "l think that's the place to start."

"The phone-using horses," Tobias said. "Horse-Controllers."

Something about the way he said it made it sound like he doubted the whole thing.

"We didsee a Yeerk crawl out of that horse's ear," Rachel said defensively.

"And we didalmost get fried by a Bug fighter's Dracon beam," I pointed out.

"You didn't actually see a Bug fighter, though. And with pathetic human eyes, who can tell if it's a Yeerk slug or just a plain old snake? Now that I can become human again, I can really remember how blind humans are."

"l cannot believe you don't believe us, Tobias^ Rachel complained.

"l didn't say I don't believe you. It's just that it doesn't make any sense. I mean, why would Yeerks want to infest some skanky wild horses?"

"l don't know," I admitted. "But I know what I saw."

"There!" Rachel said. "A bunch of horses. Over by the water hole.

Maybe that's them."

We banked sharply left and headed toward them. There were half a dozen mares, two gangly colts, and one big stallion who stood off by him- self on a slight rise. The stallion sniffed the breeze, head high.

"That's not them," I said.

"How do you know?"

"Because they're acting exactly like horses, that's why. They have colts.

And the stallion is behaving like a stallion. The horses we want won't act that way."

"Okay. Well, you guys need to demorph," Tobias said. "You're nearly at the two-hour limit. There are some rocks over there. You'll have shade and privacy."

So we headed for the rocks and landed. They were just a pile of rocks like any other jumble of boulders.

Except that we'd overlooked one vital fact: They were on the far side of the sign. The sign that said THIS MEANS YOU.

Chapter 8

We flew down into the rocks and demorphed.

It was a nice little enclosure, with tall, rounded boulders all around us and clean, dry sand under our feet. We were completely hidden from anyone coming in any direction.

Tobias came to rest beside us as Marco, Rachel, and I returned to our human forms. Of course, as always when we came out of a morph, we were in our morphing suits, and barefoot.

The sun beat down, but we were mostly in shade. A warm breeze blew and whistled between the rocks: WHEEE-HEEEEEE-WHEEE-EEEEE- WHEEE "All we need now is a picnic lunch," Marco 50

said. "Tobias! Go rustle us up some juicy rats and toads."

"No need," Tobias said coolly. "Just eat that snake you're sitting on."

"Yaaahhh!" Marco screamed as he leaped to his feet and began slapping his behind frantically.

A small black snake slithered away from the pocket of warm sand where Marco had been sitting.

"I'm bit! I'm gonna die! A rattler bit my butt!"

"lt's not a rattler, and he didn't bite you," Tobias said. "He's just a harmless bull snake."

"No snake is harmless," Marco muttered. "But keep your hawk eyes open in case a rattler does come for me."

"l will protect your butt from snake bite, Marco," Tobias said solemnly.

"Let's just morph back," Rachel suggested. "We don't need to rest. I feel fine."

"There's no rush, is there?" I asked.

Morphing is tiring. It wears you out. Sometimes we've had to morph very quickly with no rest between shape changes. But that's not the best way to do it. You feel much more energized if you wait a little while.

Rachel shrugged. "No. No rush." She stretched up on her toes and looked around at the boulders. The WHEE-EEING wind caught her hair and blew it in her face. "It looks like some scene from an old Western.

The good guys are up here in the rocks hiding from the bad guys. All we need is six-guns and rifles."

CHICK-CLICK!

"What the —" Tobias cried.

CHICK-CLICK! CHICK-CLICK!

I froze at the sound. I'd heard it before in real life. And I'd heard it on TV a thousand times. It was unmistakable. It was the sound of weapons being cocked.

I looked upward and there above us, pointed straight at our heads, were the black muzzles of automatic rifles.

I was so busy staring at the guns, it took a few seconds before I even noticed there were people holding the weapons. They wore helmets covered in camouflage fabric. Desert-style camouflage in shades of tan and beige. Their uniforms were desert camouflage, too.

Their faces were not friendly.

One of the soldiers stood up and put his hands on his hips. "Okay now, here's what we're going to do. The three of you are gonna lie down, facedown in the sand, and place your hands behind your heads, fingers laced together."

I thought, Thethree of us?Of course! They thought Tobias was a hawk.

"But we're not doinganything," Rachel protested, sounding pretty much like I remember her sounding years ago when her mom would catch us rifling through her closet looking for clothes to try on.

"You have illegally entered a restricted government facility," the man said. "And you are in a world of hurt. Sergeant! Search them for weapons or contraband. And someone chase away that big old hawk there. He's staring at me."