Thank you to Art Alphin

  For Larry, Austin, and Ashley

  And for Michael and Jake

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SNEAK PEEK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  I dove. Tucked my wings. Folded my tail. Hurtled toward earth!

  I was a bullet. A bullet with feathers.

  And feeling pretty righteous until Tobias rocketed past. He skimmed the top of the freight train and looped sideways in a corkscrew roll, wing over wing. His feathers grazed the big gun of one of the tanks.

  I said.

  He pulled out of the roll.

  We pumped our wings and shot past the locomotive. Two guys wearing bib overalls and ball caps sat inside. One, the engineer, I guessed, was driving while the other watched the track ahead.

  They weren’t wielding Dracon beams. Or weapons of any kind. And they weren’t paying any attention to the osprey and red-tailed hawk who’d dropped from the sky to spy on them.

  said Tobias.

  I said.

  I wheeled. Scanned the line of flatcars. Nothing unusual. Nothing that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Still, something prickled at the back of my brain. Something didn’t seem right.

  Battling aliens every day of my life has fine-tuned my already rampant paranoia.

  I powered my wings and caught up to Tobias and the locomotive. A beautiful thermal radiated up the side of the mountain. I fanned my wing and tail feathers and soared on the billowing jet of warm air.

  The freight train clattered below. One engine pulling a line of flatbed cars, loaded with military tanks. M-1 Abrams.

  Yeah, M-1 Abrams. I knew them as well as I knew my own PlayStation. All those hours playing Tank Commando had finally paid off.

  The M-1s belonged to the National Guard. They were chained one to a flatcar, their big guns rotated toward the back. And they were headed toward the city.

  Truck and Humvee convoys had been snaking into town for days. Battalions of National Guard soldiers from all over the state were bunkered in Guard centers around the city.

  Now they were bringing in tanks.

  Ax had been monitoring all the local TV channels and the cable news networks, but nobody had mentioned a wide-scale urban training exercise. I couldn’t find anything on the Internet, and the Chee hadn’t heard anything from their Yeerk sources, either.

  Tobias and I were here to do a little firsthand investigation. To find out if our state government had finally realized Earth was being invaded. To see if they were mounting a defense.

  Or to see if this was a carefully laid out Yeerk plan. Were all those National Guard troops Controllers? Some of them, yeah. But all of them? We were talking thousands of soldiers. If they were all Controllers, we were in big trouble. We were talking serious doo-doo.

  But we were betting they weren’t. Hoping they weren’t. Careful prior planning wasn’t Visser One’s usual MO. He usually jumped in with both feet and a lot of noise. And if the details didn’t work themselves out, he just ripped a sub-visser’s head off and plowed ahead with his next maniacal plan.

  Besides, with a Blade ship and a fleet of Bug fighters at his disposal, the visser didn’t need a bunch of clunky tanks.

  On the other hand, Visser One had been pushing for all-out war. To wage war, you need an army. And if you need an army in a hurry, why not hijack an existing one? If the highest-ranking National Guard officers were Controllers, Visser One could easily round up the rest of the troops for a mass infestation of host bodies. And if he got the tanks out of the way, noninfested troops couldn’t use them against him.

  Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk.

  The freight train rolled along the tracks. It wasn’t going all that fast for a train. About ten miles an hour. Maybe fifteen downhill.

  But it was plenty fast for sustained, level, raptor flight. Tobias and I had started out over the engine, slipped back to the first flatcar, then the second. Now we were somewhere near the middle and losing ground. My wing muscles ached, burned, and finally went numb.

  I wheeled again. Studied the train. Something still seemed odd. What was I missing?

  Nothing, Marco. There’s nothing scary on this train. If there were, your raptor eyes would’ve seen it a mile off. You’re just a paranoid freak.

  A paranoid freak whose wings felt like they were going to snap off if I didn’t stop flapping them.

  I said.

  I dove toward a flatcar in the middle of the train and swept over the top of the tank. My talons skidded across the big brass padlock on one of the top hatches. I locked them around a metal cargo cage, pulled my wings down, and hunkered against the bottom of the cage. Wind whipped the feathers on the top of my head.

  A shadow slid over me. Tobias latched onto the hull of the tank, behind a big metal ring.

  He hugged the metal. he said.

  The train groaned down a steep hill. I turned my head. The column of tanks stretched out behind me, chugging through pine trees that towered above us on either side of the track. Sunlight filtered through the pine needles and flickered over the camouflage green of the tanks.

  I saw no other movement. No life-forms, extraterrestrial or domestic.

  Normal. Everything looked —

  Wait.

  said Tobias.

  I turned my head.

  Another red-tailed hawk swooped around a curve ahead. Behind it, in formation, flew a squadron of golden eagles and peregrine falcons.

  We were definitely not alone.

  The red-tailed hawk shot toward the train. The eagles and falcons followed, banking and diving above the tracks.

  Tobias directed his private thought-speak to me.

  The eagles and falcons swooped past the locomotive and perched on the first tank. The red-tailed hawk hung in the air and watched the train pass under it. They hadn’t seen us.

  Yet.

  Tobias slipped down the hull of the tank and crept underneath, into the dark cavern between the tank’s tracks. Where he could see without being seen.

  But I was on top. On the turret. I couldn’t move without catching the hawk’s eye. I pressed myself against the floor of the cargo basket and watched. Waited. Hoped my gray-and-white feathers blended in with the camouflage paint of the tank.

  Right. We’re talking about hawk vision here. No such thing as camouflage.

  The red-tailed hawk kited above the train. Examined each car, each tank, that passed below.

  I peered through the wire cage. Twelve of them. Two of us.

  James and his gang. A group of auxiliary Animorphs we’d recently recruited to help us fight the Yeerks. Disabled kids by day. Superheroes by night. Or something like that.

  The Animorphs — originally just five human kids and one Andalite — are trying to stop the Yeerks. I’m one of the human kids. Marco. That’s all I’m going to tell you about me. No last name. No address.

  Not that it probably makes any difference anymore. The Yeerks know who I am. Or know who I was, anyway.

  Yeerks. I’m sure you know all about them by now. If not, here’s the condensed version: slimy gray slugs that slither into your ear canal, flatten themselves out over the surface of your brain, and seize control of your body. Parasitic aliens who are conquering Earth, one human at a time.

  My mother was a Controller, controlled by one of the most powerful Yeerks in the Yeerk Empire, the former Visser One. We rescued her, killed the Yeerk who’d slithered into her head, staged a fake death for my dad and me, and evacuated to the mountain valley of the free Hork-Bajir.

  Which should’ve been great. And it was. For me personally. And for my family. Okay, so we were on a never-ending camping trip with seven-foot-tall bladed aliens who rarely, if ever, bathed. And no, I hadn’t seen an indoor toilet in weeks.

  But I wasn’t complaining. I had my mom back. Had my family back. And, as an added bonus, algebra homework was now only a distant, quickly fading memory.

  But for the Animorphs, and for the war we were fighting, my mother’s escape was the beginning of a long, terrifying, downhill slide. And we were about to hit rock bottom. Hard.

  A big part of the reason we were struggling was that the Yeerks had had better weapons than us. Plus, they outnumbered us about three gazillion to six. But we had a couple of advantages that helped level the playing field.

  One: We could morph. We could touch an animal, acquire its DNA, then become that animal. A dying Andalite war-prince gave us that ability, and with it we could infiltrate, spy, destroy, and kick Yeerk butt in ways no human ever could. Two: Since morphing is Andalite technology, the Yeerks believed we were all Andalites. The former Visser Three, commander of the Yeerk invasion of Earth, had turned the planet upside down looking for a rogue band of blue aliens.

  But he didn’t find us, because he never looked in places we might actually be. Cozy suburban houses on tree-lined, Leave-It-To-Beaver streets. Noisy school hallways between classes. The food court at the mall. Not your typical Andalite hangouts. Well, except maybe the food court. After this war is over, I fully expect Ax, our resident Andalite, to spend the rest of his life in human morph at Cinnabon.

  After we rescued my mother, though, it didn’t take Visser Three long to figure out the “Andalite bandits” just might be human. He was promoted to Visser One, and he poured most of his resources into finding us.

  The other Animorphs were forced to rescue their families and flee to the Hork-Bajir valley. Rachel with her mom and two sisters. Cassie with her parents. Tobias with his mother.

  And Jake. Alone.

  We tried to get Jake’s family out. Even Tom, his brother, who’d been a Controller since the beginning of the invasion. But the Yeerks got there first. Turned his mom and dad into Controllers, too.

  Turned Jake into someone none of us knew anymore.

  Ax moved to the valley, too. It had become our new sort of base.

  Bottom line: We were human kids, and the Yeerks knew it. And we’d thought that was the worst thing that could happen to us.

  We were wrong.

  We needed more help. More firepower. More Animorphs. So we recruited humans we knew we could trust. Humans the Yeerks had written off. Humans they wouldn’t infest.

  Disabled kids.

  The Yeerks caught on to what we were doing, and in the the last battle we lost the morphing cube. The blue box that gave anybody who touched it the power to morph. Our one weapon, the weapon Visser One had never been able to overcome, had fallen into Yeerk hands. Yeah, we could still morph. But now the Yeerks could, too.

  Things were very, very bad.

  I looked into the sky. The red-tailed hawk circled. Examined the tanks below. Its eyes locked onto mine.

  Birds do not have lips. Birds cannot smile. But I swear this one did.

  “TSEEEEEEEER!”

  The red-tailed hawk rocketed from the sky, eyes gleaming in triumph.

  Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk.

  The freight train was giving me a free ride right toward my enemy.

  I flapped to the top of the cargo bin and found a foothold.

 

  Tobias inched onto the bed of the flatcar. Four blocks of wood were wedged against the tank’s tracks, two in front, two in back, keeping it from rolling. Tobias stood beside one of the front blocks, in its shadow, out of the hawk’s line of vision.

  he said.

  My thought-speak actually sounded confident, like I really knew what I was doing.

  I spread my wings. Flared my feathers. Fanned my tail. It’s what raptors do when they’re threatened. Make their bodies as large and menacing as possible.

  What raptors do not do is plan suicidal fake-out maneuvers. No, that was purely a human move. My wings weren’t spread high and wide just to make me look tough, though I’m sure I was one intense-looking bird. My wings were actually covering a thick steel tube that jutted up behind me through the cargo basket.

  A steel tube I was betting the hawk, in his rush to skewer my guts, hadn’t noticed.

  I glared at him. Dared him to hit me.

  “TSEEEEEEEEEEER!”

  I stood my ground. Held my perch. My tail feathers flicked up and down like a lever, adjusting my balance to the movement of the train.

  Tobias watched from the shadows, wings tense, ready to blindside the hawk if I failed.

  The hawk plummeted, his beak aimed at my exposed chest.

  Six feet above me. Four. Two.

  Now!

  I dove. Sideways and down, toward the hull of the tank.

  Thungk-crack.

  The red-tail slammed into the steel pipe above me.

  Thump.

  And fell backward into the cargo basket. He lay on the bottom of the cage, unmoving, his neck twisted back and to the side.

  Tobias lifted his wings.

  The train rattled around a curve. We swooped over the side. Stayed low. And came beak to beak with the pack of golden-eagle-Controllers.

  Did I mention that a golden eagle is almost three times as big as an osprey? That it’s got about three times as much attitude and, in my opinion, is wound just a little too tight?

  And that’s just your regular, run-of-the-sky golden eagle. Stir in a crazed Yeerk and a terrified human host, and we’re talking one seriously demented bird.

  I cut sharply to the right. Tobias was already ahead of me. We powered our wings and shot toward the front of the train, six golden eagles on our tails.

  Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk.

  The clatter of flatcars nearly drowned out the sound of beating wings. We whipped past one car. Another. We were gaining on the train.

  The eagles were bigger. Meaner. But not as quick. If we could outlast them, we could outdistance them. I flapped my wings. We rounded the curve.

  said Tobias.

  Five falcons circled above us. They weren’t as big as the golden eagles. Not even as big as me or Tobias. But a whole lot faster.

  One of the falcons peeled off. Dove!

 

  But this wasn’t just any bird. This was a peregrine falcon. Not a bullet with feathers. A missile. A missile shooting toward me at two hundred miles an hour.

  Which gave me zero time to think up a suicidal fake-out maneuver.

  We were absolutely, positively toast.

  The falcon dropped from the sky. Another peregrine zeroed in on Tobias.

  I pumped my wings. Scanned the rail bed, searching for an opening. A hiding place. A shield.

  Nothing.

  A wall of trees on one side. A freight train on the other. A flock of psycho-eagles behind.

  I yelled.

  I dove between two flatcars. Tobias followed.

  Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk.

  Metal grated against metal. We dodged under axles. Between wheels. Around brake boxes. It was reckless and desperate and stupid. Thousands of pounds of steel zinging along the tracks, a fraction of an inch from our wings, our legs, our heads. One wrong move, one slight miscalculation, and we’d be chicken nuggets.

  But it was our only chance.

  We shot between the rail bed and the floor of the flatcars above. Lost an eagle. And another. A bird with a seven-foot wing span has no business under a moving freight train.

  But the falcons kept coming. From the front. From behind. Raking. Slashing. Pummeling.

  I screamed.

  Tobias screamed back.

  I jetted out from beneath a car, two falcons on my tail. I shot up. Around the tank. In. Out! Lost one of the falcons. Spun around the big gun. Lost the other.

 

  Talons the size of meat hooks clamped around my back, pierced feathers, then flesh, as a golden eagle plucked me from mid-flight.

  I thrashed. Tried to wrench free. My skin ripped beneath the eagle’s viselike grip. Claw scraped bone.

  The eagle beat its wings and rose above the train. I dangled from its talons like a helpless field mouse, twisting and writhing.

 

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