"I'm not surprised," says Ethan.

"I'd be talking about telling the authorities or something to take the pressure off you kids but I've seen enough to know that's suicide - if they don't have the authorities they have their spouses or their kids or their assistants."

"I had worried about you taking that position," says Bella. "I'm glad I was mistaken."

"No kidding," says Trouble. "Okay, so back to the rescue job. What's your plan for getting the morphs, Bella?"

"Seattle has an aquarium. It has orcas. You get to play killer whale bait."

He beams.

"Do I want to know?"

"You have less than zero desire to know, Dad."

Trouble giggles.

"Right. I don't have a pigeon morph."

"You can sit on somebody's foot in the beetle form. I hope, anyway - if you don't think you can stick on there might have to glue you, have somebody else carrying a little tube of glue, you'll come apart on demorphing."

"...Are you sure about the coming apart?" wonders Trouble. "I mean, probably, yeah, but we might want to check first."

"Oh, wow, you do not know Bella that well, she combined morphing and every household product that exists the first week we had it," groans Andi, "yes, he'll come off when he demorphs."

"He will probably come off when he demorphs," says Bella, "and the worst case scenario isn't irrecoverable if it's just a little dab of glue - Andi, you kind of confound all the results because you're so fast and controlled and you're the one I was trying stuff with."

"Do you think," says Ethan, "that it might be a good idea to let the rest of us know your results when you do these little experiments?"

"I'll go over everything I found when we're back in Phoenix if you like - I don't have the relevant notebook with me so I'd be working from memory and nothing springs to mind as usefully as the glue thing."

"Most of it was boring. She made me pierce her ear to see what would happen when she morphed after," recalls Andi. "The earring she borrowed from Mom came out when she morphed me and the hole was gone when she morphed back."

"I'm sure it was very boring," says Ethan. "Which is why I want to know all about it, so I'll never have to do any of it myself."

"We also found out that when I turn into her I still don't like almonds but do start liking cilantro? Usually it tastes like soap."

"We can go over all of this when I have the right notebook in front of me. In any event, gluing Charlie to someone's foot is probably safe."

"All right. So when do we head out?"

"Dad, are your co-workers liable to swing by?"

"Couple of them might," he acknowledges. "Once the rangers are sure I'm dead and not clinging to life in a cave or something."

"So we need to be home the rest of today, but Dad's friends - unless they're suspicious Controllers? - aren't going to go prowling upstairs uninvited if we're short with them at the door. Me and Andi and Robin are all officially here and can take turns being downstairs and awake to answer the door while everybody else naps so they can stay up late. After ten p.m. nobody is going to go bother some teenage girls whose father just died, so we can go then, pigeons aren't great for at night but we'll have city lights to go by and should be able to manage. Orcas will be in a tank open to the air, with any luck we can find one by itself so Trouble can calm down one hundred percent of the whales in the tank for us."

"Nobody who'd be likely to come by is a Controller. I can write you a list of local ones, if you need it."