Cassie had just left her parents´ house, ready to go to school, when she started to feel disorientated. Her head began to pound like something invisible was playing drums with it. Next to her was a cornfield on a steep slope that was almost ready for harvest. She stumbled, fell and rolled about halfway into it, until she was finally stopped. She laid there, unmoving, her closed eyes upwards. The plants in front stayed untouched and no one had seen what just happened.
When she did not show up at school, Rachel, usually sitting next to her, started getting worried. As soon as she left the classroom during first break, she pulled out her mobile phone and called Cassie´s father, asking him if she was sick today. He answered that she had felt fine when she had left this morning.
After Rachel told him that she had never arrived, he got worried as well and promised that he would call the police. Then Rachel ended the call and went to find the others to tell them that Cassie was missing.
After hearing this, no one could really concentrate on their teachers and were just glad when school was over. They met Loren and Arbron, already morphed Taxxon and in the process of tunneling underground, in the forest. They agreed that the others would morph into birds and try to spot Cassie from above.
They were searching for about an hour, when Arbron contacted them:" I am in a field near Cassie´s house. The scent of her is very strong, so she was here this morning, but now she is gone and I can not smell her anywhere else. I am coming back now."
The others went back to Loren´s house, defeated. Now that they were missing two members of their team with no way of knowing what happened to them, they were getting sure that it had to do something with the Yeerks. If they were on to them, they needed to be extra careful. Ax was still missing and Cassie had just disappeared for the second time, so the team decided to stop their activities until they were back safely or they had found out what exactly was going on.
The police search, initiated by Cassie´s father did not bring any results either, not that it was a surprise. One or more of them had to be controllers and they were probably manipulating the non controllers. This left her parents in shock for days. Rachel and Jake spent their entire free time trying to comfort them, knowing they had much better chances to get her back, but they could not exactly tell them that. If they tried to tell then that a group of children, including their own daughter, one adult and three aliens, with only one of them currently available, turned into animals and fought an impossible war against parasitic alien slugs, they would simply believe that all of them had gone crazy.