The Predator Read Free Page B

“Thirty minutes to reach Radio Shack, find what Ax needs to make his transmitter, buy it, and get back to catch the eleven-thirty bus home. That gets back here at five after twelve. Ten minutes to spare.”
    Jake was looking pretty stony-faced, which is how he looks when he’s not sure if something will work.
    “It’s the best we can do,” I said.
    “I know. Everyone ready?” Jake asked.
    “I should go
with
you guys,” Rachel said for, like, the tenth time that morning. “I should be there.”
    “No. We can’t
all
go. If something goes wrong, we don’t want everyone caught at once,” I said. “And something is sure to go wrong.”
     Ax demanded sharply.
    Jake smiled. “Marco doesn’t believe in optimism.”
    Tobias flew almost silently into the barn through the open hayloft.
    “Okay, Ax. Time to morph,” Jake said.
    “And, um, don’t forget the morphing outfit, okay?” I reminded him. The concept of clothing kindof puzzled the Andalite. We’d gotten him skintight bike shorts and a T-shirt that he could use for morphing, but he still didn’t know why.
    It’s one of the most annoying things about morphing — dealing with clothing. We’d learned how to morph clothing, but only things that were real tight-fitting. Any time you tried to morph a jacket or sweater they just ended up shredded. And shoes? Forget about shoes.
     he said.
    “Time,” Jake said, pointing at his watch.
    Ax began to change.
    I’d only seen him do it once before—soon after we rescued him from the sunken Andalite Dome ship.
    I’ve seen a lot of morphing. I’ve done a lot of it, too. It’s always creepy watching a human being become some strange animal. But watching Ax morph was different. He wasn’t becoming an animal. He was becoming a human being.
    The stalk-eyes shrank and disappeared in his head. The deadly scorpion tail shriveled and withered and slithered up inside him like someone sucking up a piece of spaghetti.
    His front hooves disappeared completely.
    “Whoa, look out,” Jake said. He caught theAndalite as he fell forward, with no front legs to support him.
    
    A gash opened in his face and grew lips and teeth. A nose grew where there had just been small vertical slits. His eyes became smaller, more human.
    But the weirdest thing about Ax morphing was not just that he looked like a human. It was that he looked like a
particular
human.
    Actually,
four
particular humans. See, he had absorbed DNA from Jake and Cassie and Rachel and me. Somehow, by some process we did not understand, he was able to combine all four genetic patterns to come up with one person.
    The end result was definitely strange and disturbing.
    I looked at him and saw some of myself, and Jake, and Rachel and Cassie, too, although Ax was male. That was the most bizarre part. Looking at him and thinking,
Hey, he looks familiar, really familiar; in fact, hey, that’s my hair!
    “Ax, you could be either a really pretty guy, or a kind of unattractive girl,” I said.
    “I am an Andalite,” he said. “Andalite. Lite. Ite.”
    “Okay, put on those additional clothes,” Jakesaid. “Let’s get going. Tobias?” He looked up to the rafters.
     Tobias said, and flew away.
    “More clothing? Clo. Clo-theeeeng. Clotheeng?” Ax said.
    “Ax? Don’t do that,” I said.
    “What? Wha wha wha. Tuh.”
    “That. Where you play with the sounds. Just say what you need to say, and stop.”
    Like I said, the Andalites have no mouths and no spoken speech. Ax seemed to think mouths were some kind of toy.
    “Yes,” Ax agreed. “Yah. Ess.”
    “And one other thing? The shoes go on your feet. Not in your pockets.”
    “Yes. I remember. Mem. Ber.” He pulled his sneakers out of his pockets and looked