Cassie nearly swallowed her tongue. She had forgotten the fact that while five of them would demorph into perfectly normal-looking humans, Ax would end up in his fantastically exotic-looking Andalite body. The black feathers of Slade's raven morph blended in quite well with his black hair and nearly black shorts, but for the rest of the Animorphs, the remaining white seagull feathers couldn't have been any more obvious.

"Ax! Stay behind us and keep your head down!" Cassie hissed in a low voice, her jaw barely moving. As if she was a ventriloquist.

Moving quickly but subtly, Cassie managed to place herself between the two old men's line of sight and Aximili's tail.

"I asked what you kids are doing in that stall," the first man, the one without a cigar sticking out of his mouth, asked.

"Umm," Cassie scrambled to think of an answer. "We were just… grooming our horse?"

"Our horse?" Rachel asked, confused at first, but soon she had caught on. "Oh, yeah, that's just what we were doing. We were grooming our horse."

"That thing's kind of scrawny for a horse," the man with the cigar in his mouth said, gesturing to Ax. "What are you feeding that poor, swaybacked nag?"

"Horse food," Marco said.

"Horse food?" the first man asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah. Um… you know, horse food. Boy, you should see how much this little guy can eat. All day long I'm opening cans of horse food and filling his dish."

Cassie's forced laugh sounded more like a scream, but the two men didn't seem to notice or care. Cassie thought that they were probably too busy trying to think up a suitable response to what Marco had just said.

"He's such a kidder!" Cassie shrilled, trying somehow to not make her near-panic so obvious. "Of course we haven't been feeding our horse food from cans. We've been feeding him alfalfa and hay, like you would feed any horse. My friend here is such a goofball. Total joke machine."

"And, he's not exactly the brightest bulb in the socket," Rachel said.

Since he was standing more toward the left side of the stall, while Cassie and Rachel were more toward the right, Marco knew that there was no way for him to 'accidentally' step on Rachel's foot or dig his elbow into her ribs without being noticed. He might have tried to get Slade or one of the others to do it for him, but Slade was farther away from him than Rachel and Cassie were, and Marco doubted that any of the others would do it for him.

"He's not really stupid," Cassie corrected, while Marco silently thanked her. "He just has a habit of not taking things seriously."

"Your horse is blue," the man without the cigar said, turning his attention away from Marco and back to Cassie. "Never seen a blue horse before, not in all the time I've worked here."

"Nor have I," the man with the cigar said. "And I've been working here a lot longer than he has. I've also never seen a bunch of kids wearing feathers on their clothes."

"We… we like blue horses," Cassie said sheepishly.

"Someday all horses will be blue," Jake said flatly.

"All right, all of you kids get out of that stall," the man with the cigar said, taking his cigar out of his mouth and pointing to them with it. "This just ain't right, there ain't no part of this that's right. Why don't you kids just come out of that stall, so we can see just what's ---"

He didn't even get to finish his sentence, before Ax made two quick cuts into the thick wooden beam above the heads of the men in front of them. Cassie shouted for him to stop, but she was too late to stop what happened next. The beam, now severed from its supports, collapsed on top of the two men, knocking them unconscious.

"Run!" Jake yelled, just as he saw the two men fall to the ground.

The six Animorphs all piled out of the stall, most of them taking care not to step on the prone forms of the old men. Tobias happened to fly by just as they were leaving the stall. Seeing the two old men on the ground, and the way his friends were hurrying, trying to get out of their way before the old men regained consciousness.

(I leave you guys alone for five minutes, and look what happens!) Tobias exclaimed, not sure himself if he was serious or not.

(This isn't really the time to get into that, Hawk-boy,) Slade said tightly, vaulting over the low wall of the stall.

"Get them! Stop those kids!" one of the other workers shouted, having evidently spotted the Animorphs now that they were outside the relative safety of the stall.

Jake, his mind working faster as it always did when he or his friends were in danger, quickly came up with something that he was more or less sure would get them all out of danger. "Everybody out to the grandstands," Jake said tightly, directing his words to his friends and no one else. "We can lose them after we blend in with the crowds."

Jake was a little breathless after that, equally from demorphing, running, and speaking at the same time. Jake just hoped that the rest of the Animorphs would have the sense to finish their demorphs while they were running as well. It wouldn't do for another person to see the feathers that still clung to their bodies. Especially since, in this large a crowd, some of them were more than likely to be Controllers.

Slade was just behind Cassie, which was the way he liked it since he couldn't protect her very well if he didn't know where she was, when the door to one of the stalls slammed open in front of them. Slade was just about to scoop Cassie up and vault over the stall door, when Cassie tripped over something. Looking again, Slade saw that Cassie hadn't in fact tripped, she had been pulled down.

That was not something that Slade was going to let go lightly. Turning halfway around, which gave him a good enough view of Cassie's attacker, Slade slammed his heel into the head of the boy who had grabbed her ankle. Jerking back in pain, the guy let her go to clutch at his own head.

"Go!" Slade shouted, careful not to use Cassie's name. They were surrounded by enemies here; so it was best that he didn't give them any more information then they already had, which was almost nothing.

Nodding her thanks, Cassie dashed around the jutting stall door and out of Slade's line of sight. Slade hoped that Cassie had found herself somewhere good to hide, but with the mob of assorted track workers closing in on his position, Slade knew that his first concern should be his own safety. I hope you make it through this okay, Cassie, Slade thought to himself.

The mob was getting closer, so Slade decided to take a more… creative path to get away from them. Vaulting into a closed, empty stall, Slade turned right and leaped over the low wall that was now in front of him. Continuing this way for five more jumps and landing in a ready crouch, Slade found that he couldn't hear his pursuers' footfalls.

That didn't mean that he was safe, Slade knew, since there was still a chance that someone was looking for him and he just couldn't hear them. Deciding to take a bit of a chance, Slade rolled out of his crouching position and crawled over to the door-side wall of the stall. Peeking out over the lowish wall, Slade saw that there were three people just about to look in his direction.

Ducking back down, Slade knew that there was very little chance of him being able to get over the next wall without being seen, and probably captured. Slade didn't know what they would do to him if they managed to catch him, and he wasn't at all eager to find out. How do I get out of this? Slade demanded of himself.