The first thing Slade noticed was that his fingers were starting to tingle. Forget tingling, they're outright itching! Slade opened his eyes, lifting his hands to his face so that he could take a look at them.

What Slade saw there nearly broke his concentration: there were several long, black feathers growing right out of his fingertips. More feathers were also starting to grow in-between Slade's fingers. Slade looked around at the others, wondering if he should ask one of the others if this was the normal procedure. Cassie seemed to be morphing from the legs up, Rachel was already starting to grow feathers, but Marco's morph didn't seem to have started yet.

"She's got le-gs, she knows how to use them!" Marco singsonged.

Slade rolled his eyes. Weirdo. Closing his eyes, Slade concentrated harder on the image of the raven he was morphing. Once he did this, the changes came faster than ever. Slade could feel his teeth fusing together and forcing themselves outward to form the raven's relatively long beak. Because he still had his eyes closed, Slade didn't see the floor of the barn rushing up to meet him as he shrank down to raven size. He did feel a very odd sensation of falling, though.


We'd better get a move on, Tobias said. We want to be well clear of this place before Cassie's mom comes in, if she does decide to come in.

Slade opened his eyes, looking at the small collection of birds-of-prey standing around in the barn. Slade then took a look at what had been his left arm; there was now no trace that it had ever been a human appendage at all. This is really, really weird.

Yeah, Slade heard Marco's distinctive thought-speak voce commenting. We look like we're here to break into the cages and bust all the other birds outta here.

Huh? What is that guy going on about? Slade wondered to himself. Sudden movement drew his attention then, and Slade looked over to his right to see who had caused it. It was Cassie, spreading out her wings and preparing to fly. Slade noticed then that Cassie and Marco had chosen the exact same bird to morph.

I'm ready to fly, Cassie said. Rachel? Marco? Slade?

All of us are ready to go, it looks like, Rachel said, looking around at the other four Animorphs even as her eyes changed from her normal blue to the dark gold of the Eagle's own.

Let's fly, Cassie said.

The others all started flapping hard, and Slade took his cue from the rest of them. The four of them circled to gain altitude in the closed-in barn. Soon, the four of them had reached the rafters, where Tobias had been acting as a lookout. They took a moment to admire their new raptor vision. For Slade, this was an entirely new experience.

Slade might have had better-than-human vision, but his was mostly geared towards enhanced clarity, seeing in the dark, and picking up subtle movements. Seeing through the eyes of his raven morph was like looking through a pair of high-grade telescopes.

All right, Rachel said, after about three minutes of just staring out the open hayloft window, enjoying the Eagle's superior vision. Let's get going, shall we?