The next time the Animorphs were all gathered together was when Marco and Jake had something to report. It was a strange thing, and he didn't quite know what the pair of them were building to, but Tommy held his peace and listened.
"What do you mean, he didn't smell?" Rachel asked, folding her arms and looking distinctly incredulous.
"I mean he didn't smell," Marco reiterated, starting to pace again. "He'd picked up some scents off of other people, off the ground, off dogs, things like that, but he didn't have a scent himself. It's like there was nothing there, nobody home."
"Maybe you just didn't notice it," Rachel said, still sounding skeptical about the whole thing.
"Rachel, you've been in wolf morph, you know how good their sense of smell is," Jake said, before Tommy himself could have brought up something like that; then again, he'd never morphed a dog, so he couldn't speak from personal experience the way Jake and Marco could. "Well, a dog's sense of smell is almost as good. That's not the kind of thing a dog misses."
Rachel, shaking her head in annoyance, didn't say anything else. After a bit more discussion – and some teasing of Marco by Rachel about his new, far shorter haircut – they all decided to investigate the boy Jake and Marco had met at the concert earlier. A few ideas about how they might be able to track down the boy who didn't seem to smell and was also working for The Sharing, before Cassie suggested to look him up in the phone book.
Nearly everyone who'd been talking about ways to track him down seemed more than a little sheepish about that, but Marco remained as snippy as ever.