I'm not really much of a morning person. Beds, to my mind, are made for plopping into at around ten o'clock when you're completely exhausted, and then lolling around lazily in for most of the morning. My dad, who's more of an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of person, thinks this is the mark of a serious character defect, so even in summer I try to at least set my alarm clock as a sort of gesture, but this night I guess I forgot, and so I didn't wake up the next morning until the eight-o'-clock sunshine came streaming through my window.

For a moment, I started to panic. Why had Josh let me sleep in so late? We were in the middle of a mission, weren't we? Why hadn't he come in at around six, given me a gentle shake on the shoulder, and whispered that we needed to fly out to the community center and take out a rampaging Taxxon or something?

Then I remembered: this was my mission. The rest of the Morph Force was depending on me to lie around in bed till eight, to pour too much milk on my cereal at breakfast, to lose to the parallel-universe Josh at Take One – in short, to be Elly for three days.

Well, no one's ever going to accuse me of disloyalty to my comrades, so I rolled over, cuddled Jacques a little closer to my chest, and drifted back into that not-quite-awake state that Saturday mornings were made for.

When I finally did get up and go downstairs, of course, Daddy made a big fuss about it. "Ah!" he said, raising his hands and making his eyes go wide. "The Princess of Dreamings condescends at last to grace us with her presence. Permit me to welcome thee to the waking lands, O fairest of maidens."

I just smiled and took the Honey Nut Cheerios down from the cupboard. "That's nice," I said. "Are you going to use it in the new book?" (My dad's a professional fantasy writer; he's written five novels about this wizard named Bellman, who works for some imaginary kingdom's royal family and solves problems for them.)

Daddy sighed, and turned back to his computer screen. "Not any time soon," he said. "Right now I'm at one of those tedious stages where I don't have time for rhetoric; it's all I can do just to keep the plot moving forward. I still have no idea how I'm going to get Princess Nicolette out of the Fligart Swamp."

I blinked. "What's Nicolette doing in the Fligart Swamp?"

"If I told you, you wouldn't have to read the book, now would you?"

I sighed. My dad has this weird aversion to letting me know the plots of his books before they're published; I think he's worried that I'd run off and tell Angela, and Angela would tell her father, and he'd tell the book critic at the newspaper where he works, and so on, and, by the time the book actually came out, everyone in America would already know how Princess Nicolette got into the Fligart Swamp. I don't know how he thinks A. A. Milne got away with what he did; maybe he figures that Christopher Robin was half asleep when he heard the stories anyway, so it didn't really count.

Anyway, I didn't have too long to brood about it, because I'd just put the milk on my cereal when I heard the toilet flush, and Josh – the parallel one – came out of the downstairs bathroom. "Hey, Elly," he said. "Not a fake one, like Sirius Black."

I stared at him for a second, then realized this must be a Take One clue. "Um… letters?"

"T to M," he said, with that little smirk that says he's come up with a real stumper this time. (What makes it all the more irritating is that he's usually right.)

I went through all the movies that I could think of that had T's in the title. The Two Mowers, Mime Bandits, Mender Mercies… but no, that wouldn't be it. Josh wouldn't be so proud of himself if the change had been in the first letter of a word; we both agreed that changing first letters was the mark of a second-rate Take-One-er. (Though if the result was cute enough, the way Mom's "Sam the Lion's less-successful cousin – S to D" had been, we were sometimes willing to make an exception.)

Let's see. The Passion of the Chrism… Beam the Devil… Bram Smoker's Dracula… None of those sounded like they had much to do with Sirius Black. I decided to change the subject. "So, what are we doing this afternoon?" I said, stirring my cereal as nonchalantly as I could.

Josh shrugged. "Ask Mom," he said. "She's back in the master bedroom with a pile of probate briefs; apparently a whole bunch of the old people in the county decided to die this week."

"Oh."

My disappointment must have showed on my face, because Josh frowned and asked if there was anything wrong. I smiled, and tried to make a joke out of it. "Well, you know," I said, "it's always a little sad when people die, isn't it?"

Josh snorted. "Well, their heirs seem to have gotten over it pretty fast," he said. "And you'd better, too, or that cereal of yours is going to be a puddle of mush before too long."

He was right about that, and it shut me up pretty effectively for a while. Once I'd finished eating, though, I decided to go back to Mom's room and see if I could talk her into changing her plans for the day. After all, what's the point of having three days to relive your pre-war childhood if your mom blows them reading legal briefs?

Mom looked up and smiled at me as I entered the room. "Morning, Elly," she said. "What brings you in here?"

I shrugged. "Oh, nothing," I said. "I was just, you know…"

Mom arched an eyebrow. "Let me guess," she said. "You woke up wanting to do something special today, for no better reason than 'just because', and so you came in here looking to see if I would be done with these (she gestured to the pile of briefs on the bed in front of her) early enough for us to visit the botanical gardens before they close at four o'clock. Am I right?"

I love my mom. "Um… yeah, basically."

Mom sighed. "Well, in that case, the answer is 'I don't know'," she said. "Most of these cases are fairly straightforward, but there are a couple I'm going to need to spend some time on. Now, I started early today, so there's a chance I'll be finished by lunchtime, but I can't promise anything."

"Okay," I said. It was a reasonable answer, and more than I had any real right to expect. There was no good reason why it should have made my heart sink the way it did, so I tried to keep my voice steady and not let it develop the whine it wanted to.

But my mom didn't get to be a judge by not knowing when someone's keeping their feelings back. Her eyes softened slightly, and she crooked a finger at me as I was turning to leave. "Come here, Ells," she said.

I went over and sat on the bed, and Mom put her arm around me and started stroking my hair with her fingernails. "I said I can't promise that I'll be done in time," she said, "and that's the truth. But, because you're my little girl, and because you don't ask for this sort of thing nearly as often as you used to, and–" she smiled "–because, to tell the truth, I wouldn't mind spending a few hours with the turtles myself, I will promise to go as fast as I possibly can. All right?"

I smiled. "All right."

"Okay, then," said Mom. "Go find something to do for a few hours, and I'll let you know what the score is at lunchtime."

I'm not sure why Mom's promise made such a difference to me. After all, all she had really said was "I don't know" again, and it wasn't as though I had doubted that she would try to get done with her work quickly – or that I was her little girl, for that matter. But maybe I just wanted to hear her say it.

What I hadn't wanted to hear her say was that thing about me not asking to go to the botanical gardens as often as I used to. It was probably true – the Yeerk me had to have better things to do than wander around looking at ginkgo trees – but I didn't really want to be reminded that this version of my mom had been cuddling a Yeerk me for the last few months. I didn't want to think about Yeerks at all – or Andalites, or parallel universes, or failed acquisition missions, or anything like that. I wanted to think about whether I had fed Lapkin that morning, and when I would be getting together with Angela again, and whether I wanted to be a Poor Clare or a Benedictine when I grew up, and everything else that Mom and Dad and this Josh thought I spent my time thinking about. After all, wasn't that what I was supposed to be doing?

But, even with that, I still felt pretty good. In fact, when I went back upstairs and passed Josh in the loft, I felt so good that I didn't mind saying, "Okay, I give up. What's the answer?"

"True Grim," said Josh proudly.

I groaned. "Of course."