"We were lucky," Jake said. "No one happened to snap any pictures of a pack of raptors carrying the guy to the water. And no one happened to wonder why a dolphin would be so far upstream from the ocean."

"The man was lucky, too," Cassie said.

Marco shook his head. "No way. Lucky would have been getting mouth-to-mouth from Naomi Campbell."

"Where are the cinnamon buns?" Ax asked. "Tobias said he would get some.

Cinnamon buns. Bun-zuh."

Ax was there in his human morph, of course, since the sight of an Andalite hanging around the food court would have attracted just a little attention. But the real Ax did not have a mouth. Did not have the ability to make spoken sounds. And worst of all, did not have a sense of taste.

So when he morphed to human, he tended to become fixated on taste and sounds. Especially taste.

And especially, for some strange reason, on cinnamon buns.

"I wonder what happens to George Edelman now?" Cassie asked.

"Who?"

She rolled her eyes at me. "The guy. The man. The man whose life you saved, Rachel."

"Oh. Is that his name?"

"Yes, it was in all the newspaper articles," she said, exasperated with me.

I shrugged. "Okay, okay. So his name is George Edelman. Big deal."

Cassie leaned across the table. "Rachel, you saved this man's life.

Without you the rest of us wouldn't have seen him in time. Without you he'd have been a splat on the concrete. You are a hero. A human life was saved. He may go on to cure cancer or something. And you don't remember his name?"

Now that she mentioned it, I did feel like maybe I should know the man's name. On the other hand .... "Hey, wait a minute. This guy isn't anything to me," I said. "It's not like I'm responsible for him."

Marco made a back and forth gesture with his hand. "I don't know. Isn't it the Chinese who say if you save a man he becomes your responsibility?

Or maybe it's the Japanese. The Greeks? Someone. I saw it in a movie."

I shrugged again. Now I was feeling defensive. "It was mostly just a goof, you know? I just wanted to see if we could do it. It was ..." I searched my mind for the right word. "It was a challenge. That's it, a challenge."

Tobias arrived, carrying a Cinnabon cinnamon bun. One of the large ones.

Dripping with icing and smelling of cinnamon. Lots of cinnamon.

Ax's human eyes went wide. His mouth hung open slightly. It was weird, because Ax's human morph is made up of DNA from Cassie, Jake, Marco, and me. So you're always seeing something familiar in him, you know? Like maybe it's your own mouth hanging open, or Marco's eyes.

Tobias set the paper plate down on the table. "I figured we could all have a bite and then leave the rest for -" He stopped and stared at Ax with an expression of amusement mixed with awe.

Ax had snagged the bun. He'd snagged the plate and the plastic fork, too. He was busy shoving them into his mouth. Bun and plate and fork.

Great big huge bun and little paper plate.

I reached over and grabbed the end of the plastic fork. Half of it was already in Ax's mouth. I yanked it out. It was too late to save the plate.

The five of us just sat there for a few minutes and watched as Ax chewed and slobbered and gulped and shoved with his fingertips.

It was alittle like watching a python try to swallow a small pig.

"George Edelman, huh?" I said, breaking the spell.

"Yeah," Jake said. "But everyone keep an eye on TV and newspapers for a while, okay? If someone noticed our. . . activities ... we want to know about it. Mostly, we have to hope George Edelman keeps his mouth shut."

"People will figure he's nuts," Marco pointed out. "No one is gonna listen to a guy who tried to kill himself."

Three days later. My house. My still-not-completely-fixed house.

"Jordan! JORDAN!"

That would be me, yelling. I was in the kitchen. I had opened the refrigerator and discovered that my white paper container of leftover Chinese food was gone.

"Jor-DAN! You little thief."

"What?"

I turned away from the refrigerator and slammed straight into the kitchen island. We didn't used to have a kitchen island. But our kitchen had been annihilated when my bedroom had collapsed down into it.

The construction had been pretty shoddy, I guess. And it hadn't helped at all that I had morphed into an African elephant in my bedroom.

Fortunately, no one in my family knew that but me.

Anyway, we were in the process of getting a much cooler kitchen now. My mom's a lawyer and she got the insurance company to pay up right away.

Plus the builder of the house was so scared that something else would happen, he was doing all the labor free.

I felt bad about the builder getting blamed. But what was I supposed to say? "Mom, it was me. See, I was allergic to this crocodile morph, and it made me morph out of control so that I ..." You get the idea. Wasn't going to happen.

Anyway, I slammed into the new kitchen island and fought down the urge to say something I shouldn't repeat. But I was mad, and now I was mad with a bruise on my hip, so i stuck my finger in my little sister's face and said, "You! You ate my Szechuan shrimp! I was saving it. I want it.

I want it right now."

A couple years ago that would have scared Jordan. But she's getting older now, and more independent. Plus more of a smart-mouth.

"Rachel, I took your stupid shrimp yesterday. And I threw it out."

"What! You threw out my Szechuan shrimp? You are always doing something with my leftovers."

She shook her head slowly, pityingly. "It was already a week old, duh.

It was too old, duh. It would have made you barf up your kidneys, duh.

Shrimp doesn't exactly stay good forever, duh. And oh, by the way, did I mention, duh?"

"You should have asked me!" I cried, in no mood to be reasonable.

"Okay, Rachel," Jordan said placidly. "Should I have thrown out your rancid, bacteria-crawling, moldy leftovers like Mom asked me to, or should I have left them for you to eat so you'd end up having to get your stomach pumped?"