"Rachel, listen to me. Start demorphing. Right now."

"There's some guy! Who's that guy?" she asked, glaring at Fenestre with eagle's eyes.

"Rachel, for once, don't argue. Forget the guy, we're getting out of here. Demorph! Do it! Marco. Get Rachel. Carry her out of here."

"l'm not letting him carry me!"

But she was too weak to do much, so Marco went over and lifted her gently in his massive gorilla hands.

"Perhaps we'll meet again," Fenestre said cockily as we backed away.

I said nothing. What was there to say? I was letting a monster live. I was letting a killer go free.

By the time we hit the stairs Rachel was de-morphing. Ax was almost fully Andalite. He still had two bird-shot pellets in his body, but they weren't enough to harm him.

Tobias flew, as well as he could, overhead. We stumbled and trotted down the stairs, through the wreckage of the house and outside into the fenced, defended yard.

By the time we reached the trees, Rachel was Rachel again. We all demorphed, and soon we were five tired, wary kids and one Andalite hidden in the deep shadows of the trees.

We could still see the house. Fenestre's billionaire mansion.

"What happened in there?" Rachel demanded. "Someone ripped that place.

Was there

some big fight and I missed it? Oh, man! I can't believe I missed a big fight. So what happened?"

"Someone will tell you later," I said shortly.

"Was the guy a Controller or not?" Rachel demanded. "Was he a good guy or a bad guy?"

I laughed a little. My eyes locked with Cassie's and then we both looked away, unwilling to make contact. "Rachel, I don't even know which /am anymore."

J. guess someone eventually told Rachel and Ax what had happened. It wasn't me.

I got home and went up to my room and just stared at nothing for a long time. My mom called me to dinner and I mumbled my way through.

And then I went out in the backyard and sat on my rusted-out old swing set from when I was four and I stared at the sky as it turned dark. The stars came out and man, I hated them. They weren't beautiful, they were deadly. It was from the stars that all my problems had come.

My mom came out after a while. She pretended like she was checking to see if the grass needed watering. But of course she was checking on me.

"Whatcha doing out here? Thinking great thoughts?"

"Nah. Just hanging."

She locked her arms over her chest and looked up at the sky like I was doing. "It's a beautiful night. Look at the stars."

"Yeah."

"Is anything bothering you, Jake?"

"Nope."

"Well, if anything was bothering you, you could probably tell me without my embarrassing you too much."

"I know, Mom. It's nothing."

She sighed. "Well, I guess it had to happen sooner or later. You've turned into a real teenager. Mom's too out of it to talk to."

She didn't say it in a mean way. More like a joke.

I made a smile for her. "That must be it," I said. "It must be that whole teenage thing."

She shrugged. "You know, when I was your age and feeling upset, my mother, your gram, would always just say, 'You don't know what unhappy is, you're just a kid.' Like anything a kid would feel would be less difficult or painful than what an adult would feel."

"That's probably true," I said, not really listening.

"No, it isn't," my mother said firmly. "In a lot of ways being a kid is worse than being an adult. You have the same things to deal with: friends, temptations, love and hate, and all that.

Only you don't have the two great weapons that adults have to help them."

I cocked an eye at her. "What two great weapons?"

"Well, the first is experience. Experience maybe doesn't make you smarter, but it means you can think, 'Hey, I had something like this happen once before, and I survived.'"

"Okay, I'll ask: What's the second great weapon?"

She looked right at me. "You are, Jake. Because as your mom, I can look at you and think, 'Oh, man, as bad as I feel right now, as bad as things may be, at least it isn't as bad as being a teenager.'"

I laughed. It was a tired, weak laugh, but it was something.

"You know, X-Files is on. You used to love that show."

The next day at school I was still feeling bad. It's nice that my mom and dad care about me. It's nice that they sympathize. But they don't understand, and they can't understand because for them everything is about my age.

How can they help me make life-and-death

decisions? How can they help me keep making those decisions when I've made mistakes?

How can they help me make decisions no human being can ever make correctly - like deciding what to do with Fenestre?

I looked around for Cassie. We'd left it on pretty bad terms. But after a while I realized she wasn't there. Wasn't in school.

I suddenly knew where she was.

I made my way to the roof of the school building, cursing under my breath because I knew I was going to get busted for skipping second period. Then I morphed to my falcon and flew away.

I wasted some time going to Gump's house, which was stupid. Cassie would have waited till he was away from the house. So I searched around for the nearest elementary school and headed there.

The kids were at recess. One little boy was way off by himself at the far end of the playfield. There was a dog with him. At least, the average person walking by would think it was a dog. I knew it was a wolf.

As I watched, the little boy patted the wolf and then walked back to his classmates.

The wolf watched him go, then jumped the fence and faded toward some nearby trees.

"Cassie," I said.

She looked up, surprised. I landed on the

ground and began to demorph. She resumed her human shape, too.