Once they'd managed to find Erek King's home address, as well as working out a schedule of just who was going to be watching the boy Marco had once seemed to know, Tommy once again found himself on the sidelines waiting for information. Since he had more activities to fill his time with than any of the other Animorphs, Tommy couldn't exactly participate in surveillance when the rest of them needed him to.
That, of course, left him with more time to observe the Controllers posing as his adopted parents.
They seemed to be getting some kind of new assignment if the way they were trying so hard not to talk when he was around was any kind of indication, as well as the words they let slip when they thought he wasn't listening. He wondered about that, but there wasn't much of a chance of him being able to find something like that out on his own, so Tommy waited. There would be time to find out about that kind of thing after they'd found out what was going on with Erek.
He could only hope that Erek wouldn't end up being a Controller, too.
The next time all of the Animorphs met up, it was in the forest that they'd spent so much time saving not so long ago. Rachel was sitting on a fallen log, while Cassie was looking down into some kind of burrow; Tommy could only hope it wasn't some kind of a skunk den. Dealing with skunks the first time was more than enough for Tommy's taste.
"Tobias is off looking for Ax," Rachel said, as he, Jake, and Marco all arrived.
"So, what's the big panic?" Rachel asked, after Cassie had said that there were three of whatever had made the burrow she was looking into.
"Okay, Marco, this is your party," Jake said, once all of them had finished greeting each other for the day. "What's up?"
Folding his arms as Marco and Tobias described the weird scene they'd seen during their turn keeping an eye on Erek: the way Erek had been chased into the street by bullies, and then sideswiped by a bus. Tommy would have been more worried about that, if it hadn't been for what happened next. Apparently, Erek wasn't human at all.
Really, it sounded like he was some kind of a robot, or something like that. Ax seemed to agree with that, and even elaborated on how he might have been able to look human the way he did. Apparently, it was some kind of a hologram, though it probably also had some kind of a force field under it, since no one who spent time around him seemed to have found out that he was a robot by touching him.
According to Ax, Erek's hologram was designed to work on eyes that saw the same wavelengths of light that human eyes worked off of, so they were going to need something that saw on an entirely different wavelength; some kind of bug, probably.