"Oh. I guess that's handy."

He laughs. "Damn right."

"That's not how come you're bitey-critter-bait, though, right, that's a different thing?"

"Yeah, mostly. I mean, maybe I wouldn't get so much out of being mauled by bears if I got more upset about pain, but who knows?"

"Not me, I do not know."

Trouble giggles.

Andi yawns. Then she says, "I wonder when Mom's going to show up. I mean, on the one hand it's convenient that we have the house to ourselves if we're not gonna tell her stuff, on the other hand it's kind of lousy that if our dad had, actually, got mauled to death by a bear, we would be alone in his house for the next several days?"

"...yeah," says Trouble, "I hear ya. Do you even know if anybody's talked to her yet? She was on a trip or something, right?"

"Nobody's reached her. I'm supposed to call the hotel she was at last night sometime today when she will probably already be gone."

"So I guess if your dad had actually been mauled to death by a bear, you might be trying harder to get ahold of her."

"Well, we could have got her on the phone last night, or I could call the hotel now," says Andi, "but there wasn't a way before that, she wasn't planning to be at specific hotels at specific times till now."

"She's probably gonna feel like shit about that when you finally talk to her."

"Yeah."

"That sucks," says Trouble.

"Every few months she thinks about getting a cell phone, then decides it would be too expensive," sighs Andi. "I bet she gets one now."

"Yeah, I'll say. Do you know if you guys are gonna tell her about - stuff?"

"I don't think Bella's decided yet."

"Yeah. It's hard."

"Mom is decent with privacy but not very good with secrets, is the problem."

He nods. "And then there's what if she just gets a random Yeerk..."

"Right. That's already happened the once and we were really lucky."

"Lucky's one way to put it, I guess."

"Well, I mean, if there had to be an Animorph getting Yeerked, you and Aspret is one of probably not all that many combinations that lets us end the day not all enslaved or dead. I don't mean it's lucky it happened at all."

"Yeah, no - what I mean is - the reason Aspret got me specifically is the same reason she could barely hang onto me," he says. "It wasn't all luck."

"Huh?"