"Way ahead of you," he says; his fingernails are sprouting into tiny feathers.

When Bella is done acquiring the whale she attempts to help Trouble back onto the glass tank edge before he gets all waterlogged. "I was thinking into Robin and back, but this works too."

<Faster this way.>

Ethan and Robin acquire the whale and climb out of the tank.

Bella turns into a bird and Charlie into a beetle. Andi retrieves the little bottle of glue she carried along and attaches Charlie to Bella's foot again, then morphs too. <We all done here?> Andi asks.

<Looks like!>

Up, up, and away!

<And now that we have our oceangoing morphs, what next? Do we head out to sea and follow Trouble down to his mysterious new friend? Do we have any notion at all of how far away that friend is? How about clever ideas for making sure we don't eat each other?>

<I,> says Bella, <will try the whale morph first to see what the shape of its brain is, since I can do that without letting it take me over. I'll report on that and then you guys follow suit, maybe a ways away from each other so you don't all get into a fight or eat the slow morphers before you get control of yourselves depending. If I'm not sure how well you guys will handle the whale Trouble can go second, he seems to lose his head less than anybody but me in new morphs. Then we follow Trouble to the distress signal. I looked up the moonset time - if we get home when I expect to and continue to the ocean right away after checking the clock, that'll be one almost-two-hours mark for demorphing and remorrphing, when the moon sets, it's due to do that at a quarter after two in the morning. If we don't find the Andalite before moonset, we turn back and attempt to set up another try another day.>

<Fine,> says Ethan.

<Might also make sense for the rest of you to sit on me to get far enough out to sea for comfortable whaling so I'm the only one who has to wriggle away from water shallow enough to easily swim to in human form.>

<Or we could all morph seagulls.>

<I'm concerned about morph space. Maybe Charlie should get a seagull since he doesn't have a pigeon, but the rest of us are loaded up and we already have a good general purpose bird.>

<And I suppose there's not much call for seagulls in Phoenix. All right.>

<It'd be more remarkable than a pigeon, anyway, unless it was at a time of year such that it could be plausibly migrating.>

<And pigeons are a little out of place in the middle of the woods, but then, seagulls aren't much better.>

<Yeah. I wish we had unlimited space and, like, an owl. I could really go for being an owl right now.>

<We don't know our space is limited,> muses Ethan. <But we don't know it isn't, either.>

<Exactly. Which is another great reason to get ahold of this Andalite, because I bet you they know.>

<I'm pretty sure it's a he,> says Trouble.

<He, then.>

<And it got fainter when we went to Seattle and it's getting stronger again now, so I bet he's not that far.>

<Is he just continually screaming?> Bella asks.