What would happen? Would I become a part of the rock? Would I be able to scream and scream with no one hearing me, no one able to help?

"Get a grip!" I ordered myself. "Stop torturing yourself. It's going to be okay."

Suddenly . . .

"Aaaahhhh!"

I was falling! Falling blind.

Trailing!

"Aaaahhhh!"

"Rachel!"

WHUMPF!

"Rachel! What's the matter?" Cassie's thought-speak voice.

I landed on my back. I landed on something almost soft. Something that reeked in my mole nose.

i was still in total, absolute darkness. I couldn't see anything. But I knew I was in a vast, open space. The Yeerk pool? No, of course not.

There would be light there.

But definitely an open space. Large. Quite large.

And then I realized I was not alone.

I didn't know what they were, but I felt their presence above me. Many, many of them.

"Rachel!" It was Jake now. "Answer if you can."

"l'm okay," I said. "!...! guess I fell into some kind of a cave."

"Do you see a guy in a cape and a really cool car?" Marco asked.

"What?" I was too preoccupied to care about his dumb jokes.

"The Batcave," he said. "l'm thinking you fell into the Batcave." It wasn't until that moment that I realized whose presence I felt above me.

"Actually, Marco, I think maybe it is a bat cave. Come on down. You can jump. It's a nice, soft landing on a bat-poop mattress." One by one they came, dropping down beside me. And soon we were six blind moles wallowing in mostly dried bat guano.

Now that I was out of the tunnel, out of the confined space, I wanted to laugh. "Well, this is pretty glorious, huh? We have tunneled our way into a major bat-poop deposit. A whole week, and we have reached a bat cave. You know what I think? I think this whole thing has been cursed.

And I think it's all my fault. I should have let that Edelman guy just splat on the concrete."

"We can't back out now," Marco said. "l have thirty-six boxes of maple-and-ginger instant oatmeal at home. In easy-open single serving pouches."

"We should demorph," Cassie said.

"Why?" Tobias asked. "So we can really enjoy the lovely ambience?"

"l was thinking since we're in a bat cave, maybe we should go into our own bat morphs," Cassie said.

"Oh. I don't have a bat morph," Tobias said.

"Easily fixed in here," Cassie said with a laugh. "l'll bet there are a few hundred thousand bats hanging from the roof of this cave. Just hanging around and waiting for someone to come along and acquire their DNA."

"You're awfully cheerful," Jake grumbled. "We're in a cave way underground with no way out except a mole tunnel we can't reach anymore^

"No, no, no," Cassie said. "Wrong. Don't you realize? The bats fly out of here at dusk. Out. As in out? As in exitl"

"Hey! She's right!" I yelled. "We won't be buried alive in here. Not that I was worried or anything."

"No, we'll just be buried in bat poop," Marco muttered. "Let's morph to bat like Cassie said."

Yes, bat was a good idea. If you're going to be in a bat cave, best to be a bat. But first we had to pass through our own natural bodies.

And oh, was that not fun.

You think it's grim being a mole in a bat cave? Try being a human. For one thing, the cave was less high than we'd thought. For another thing, we all passed through the same helpless stage where we had big, swollen human bodies with tiny little feet and arms.

"Ah, MAN!" Marco moaned. "Buried in bat -"

"Guano," Cassie said, supplying the word.

"Yeah, guano. That's what I was gonna say. Guano."

"Thisissoguh-ROSS!" I yelled.

My arms and legs reappeared and I had to stick my palms down in the stuff to raise up. The only good thing was that the awfulness of the grossness completely distracted me from the claustrophobia.

"What are you whining about, Rachel?" Tobias snapped grumpily. "Try having feathers in this stuff."

I raised myself up. I stood up. I raised my head. And that's when I made the discovery about the cave not being as high as we'd thought.

You see, my head was entirely surrounded by soft, warm, fuzzy bats.

There was really only one thing to do.

"Marco," I said. "Be sure and stretch out. Up on your tiptoes now."

"Aaaahhhh!" he yelped. "Oh, really funny, Rachel. That was so mature!"

"What, I should suffer and you shouldn't, just because you're short?"

And then, weird as it seems, we all burst out giggling. Thirty feet underground in a bat cave so dark you might as well be blind, lost, scared, and smeared with bat guano, we got the giggles.

Here. Have a bat," I said. I held one for Tobias. I wasn't afraid of bats. I'd been one.

"Thanks."

"Watch out, he'll eat it," Marco said.

"You know," Jake said in a conversational tone as we waited for Tobias to acquire the bat, "from the point where Edelman said 'maple and ginger oatmeal,' I should have known this was going to end stupidly."

"Instant maple and ginger oatmeal," Cassie said.

"Battles that involve oatmeal are just never going to end up being historic, you know?" Jake went on. "Gettysburg? No major oatmeal involve-ment. The Battle of Midway? Neither side used oatmeal. Desert Storm?

No oatmeal."

"Excuse me, but what is oatmeal?" Ax asked.

"It's a kind of food," Cassie explained.

"Is it tasty?"

"You can think about food here? Here?" Marco said. "In bat-poop land?"