ATTN: I accidentally skipped posting the chapter before this! If you read this chapter on Nov 22, 2021, please skip back to the previous chapter and read that one now. I apologize. I don't know why this keeps happening with my Animorphs fics. (I blame the confusion of shuffling between narrators...and my brain.) Sorry!

CHAPTER EIGHT: MARCO

So first thing Sunday morning, at a time when all reasonable people were asleep, we were once again trying to get ourselves killed.

{Ooh, look, a french fry!}

The fact that we were currently in seagull morph undercut the seriousness of the situation somewhat because seagulls, apparently, are completely obsessed with food and we could not resist the urge to point-out every piece of semi-edible trash we saw along the way.

{Hey is that half a Snickers?}

{Oooh, ooh! Look at the dumpster behind that McDonald's!}

Seagulls are scavengers, which means that they were really good at spotting unattended food. Really, really good.

{Oh man, somebody threw-out a whole Big Mac, look at that!}

Sometimes you just have to accept the animal's basic mindset and go with it. And at least the seagulls weren't causing us any actual problems. They were just...very food focused.

{Oooh, half-eaten hot-dog!}

Very food focused.

It got a little better once we were out over the ocean, although any time a bit of trash bobbed past we all got very excited trying to determine whether or not it was something edible.

{Hey! Is that a bag of potato chips floating down there?}

Turns out people throw a lot of trash in the ocean. It's actually pretty depressing.

We flew on, skimming the choppy surface of the water. It was a lot more work than being an osprey. Birds of prey glide; seagulls flap.

And flap, and flap, and flap…

{Hey, look,} Rachel said. {Over to the left.}

Sleek grey shapes sliced through the water, up, down, up, down, breaking the silvery barrier between sky and sea. It was a school of dolphins.

{You know, sometimes this is just so wonderful,} Rachel said. {I mean, we're flying. We're flying! And later, we'll be like them, at home in the water.}

{Yeah,} I agreed darkly, {just us and the sharks.}

{Still, it is cool,} Rachel insisted, sounding like somebody who had never been bitten almost in half by a shark before.

{There's a boat ahead,} Jake announced before I could come up with a cutting retort. {I think it's Tobias's mom. Tobias?}

{Yeah,} Tobias said. {I mean, I think so. These seagull eyes are nothing compared to my hawk's. But that looks like the boat.}

{What are the odds of it being some other random boat all the way out here, anyway?} Cassie said.

I assume it was meant to be a rhetorical question, but I answered it as if it wasn't. {A random boat?} I said. {Probably not too high. A boat full of Controllers, on the other hand? I'd say fifty-fifty.}

That shut everybody up. I might have felt bad for harshing the mood, but I was in a pretty crappy mood myself right now. I don't like the ocean. Almost dying in it yesterday had not done anything to improve my opinion. Having to rely on Tobias's batty mom and her borrowed boat wasn't making it better.

We kept flapping, and slowly we drew closer. The boat was a pretty standard power boat, I guess. What do I know about boats? Other than that I hate them.

This boat was about twenty, twenty-five feet long with a narrow nose and a squat stern. There was a short, sloped windshield in front of the two seats that had all the controls, I guess to keep the spray out of the eyes of the driver. I mean, the controls had to be waterproof, right? So it wouldn't matter if they got wet, but it probably made it hard to steer when waves were smacking you in the face…

Anyway, there were two more seats behind those, all four of them nestled in a sort of low indent, and another smaller indent in front of the windshield with more plastic cushions for seating. The steering wheel was, for some reason, on the right side of the ship. (Was that a standard feature, or a result of this boat being owned by a "kook"? I had no idea. I wasn't going to be driving, so I guess it didn't matter.) The whole thing, cushions and sides and decking, was mostly all the same off-white color with a thick dark blue stripe through which the word "Bayliner" was printed along the side of the sleek hull. I wasn't sure if that was the boat's name, or type, or what. I decided I didn't like the boat enough to care.

Loren was sitting in the pilot's seat, her blonde hair tied back in a messy braid. She seemed to know what she was doing, or at least if she'd run into anything it hadn't been hard enough to leave visible damage on the hull. She was wearing a loose, flapping button-down spotted with paint over a bathing suit and a pair of jean shorts, also spotted with paint, and light-soled sneakers. (I remembered something about that being important on boats, but not why. It's been a while since I've liked boats enough to recall stuff like that.) She had a baseball cap on her head and sunglasses perched on her nose, but at least she didn't look like somebody trying too hard to appear incognito. She just looked like a normal woman with pale skin trying to avoid a sunburn.

Tobias must have called to her, because she suddenly jumped, cut the engine, and started looking around wildly.

Trying to ignore the nervous backflips my little seagull stomach was doing, I fluttered down with the others and took a perch on the rough white surface. That was harder than I expected, because the boat was bucking up and down on the waves, but eventually we all managed to land.

Loren turned around to look at us, which made me flinch because the boat hadn't stopped moving yet, but there was nothing but open ocean in front of us so I guess it wasn't a big deal to let it coast.

"Tobias?" she said. I was half-tempted to make a comment about us being some other group of talking seagulls, but I was feeling a little too bummed to make the effort.

{Hi, mom,} Tobias said shyly.

Loren's face split into a big grin. "Wow," she said. "You're a bird. You're really a bird. Tobias, you're a bird!"

Tobias chuckled. {Yeah, we're all birds.}

"Wow. This is so amazing. So exciting for you all! And for me. Wow!"

{Yeah, it's...it's pretty cool, the morphing.}

I tuned-out of the conversation for a little. I guess it was cool and all, but I was already on-edge from the ocean-thing. And the talking-to-someone's-mom-thing. And the nearly-killed-by-a-shark thing. And the about-to-be-maybe-killed-by-the-Yeerks-thing. And the fact that my mom had died on a boat. That had been a sailboat, but still. She'd gone out on a boat, and never come back. We never found her body.

{Hey.} Jake's voice interrupted my reverie. {Earth to Marco, hello? It's your turn to demorph, man.}

I jerked around and stared at the others. Tobias and Rachel had already demorphed. Jake and Cassie were still seagulls, both staring at me with that weird little cocked-head pose that birds do.

{Right,} I said, {I knew that. I was just...centering myself.}

I hopped down into the cramped open space between the seats. There wasn't much room on the boat, which was why we were taking turns - and that little recess was the only place where somebody could crouch down enough to be out of sight of anyone passing by.

It wasn't likely that anyone was around to see us, somehow hiding in plain sight in the middle of the water, but we'd decided there was no reason to tempt fate by morphing right out in the open. Besides, none of us really wanted to morph while we were sitting on the side and risk falling overboard as some kind of half-seagull-thing.

I concentrated on my human body, and felt my bones grow heavy and solid. Next my feathers slooped back into my body in a way that made my skin itch like I'd just rolled through a garden of poison ivy. Meanwhile my bones were rearranging themselves, crackling and popping as they shifted and grew and changed position.

Fingers shot out of the ends of my wings as the last of my feathers faded, and my beak sunk back into my face and softened into two wide lips. Teeth formed from nothing, which always feels weird, and my eyeballs slid into place as my skull reshaped itself around my expanding brain. And all the while I was growing, increasing in size from tiny seagull to not-too-exceptionally-tall boy.

In other words, just a normal day in the life of an Animorph.

I expected Tobias's mother to be grossed-out by it all. I expected to stand up and find her puking over the side, or staring resolutely off at the distant horizon and trying to pretend none of it was happening. Instead she was staring at me with unabashed wonder, like she was drinking-in the magic of morphing.

"Uh," I said. "Hi."

"Hello, Marco." She smiled at me. "That was fascinating. You all change differently, did you know? Not in the same order at all. It's wonderful."

"Uh, yeah," I said. I climbed up off the floor and made my way carefully to the empty seat at the right - or starboard, it's starboard on a boat, I remembered - by the boat's stern. I know I make a lot of jokes about the fact that Tobias's mom is a nutter, but this was the first time I'd thought she was genuinely deranged. Who looked at somebody snapping and bulging and twisting their way into a whole new body and found wonder in that horror show?

Cassie-the-seagull was already hopping down to take my place and begin turning herself back into Cassie-the-girl.

"Cassie's the best at morphing," Tobias offered suddenly. "Check it out."

Loren pulled her attention away from me, which was a relief. I turned to stare at the ocean rather than watch Cassie demorph, having seen enough of that gross-out factory myself. Jake followed her, and a few minutes later we were all human again, barefoot and shivering against the wind in our stupid leotards and bike shorts.

Loren beamed at us.

"Well," Jake said. I guess he felt as awkward as I did. "Let's...get underway, then."

"Of course," Loren said, and turned back to grasp the wheel and crank the throttle.

The rest of us found seats, Rachel of course hopping up to sit in the bow. Cassie followed her, but rather than jumping up onto the side of the boat and walking up the gunwale like a balance beam she more sensibly opened the panel in the middle of the windshield so she could step through it like a normal person.

Jake and I took the seats in the rear, leaving Tobias to take the co-pilot chair beside his mom. Jake and I looked at each other, then away again quickly. Yeah, he definitely felt almost as awkward about this whole situation as I did.

It was nice to know that I wasn't just freaking-out over the fact that I was on a boat with somebody's mom, and that it actually was just weird to be here with someone who knew our secret. We'd let Tobias handle telling his mom the details, so I don't know how hard she was to convince, but she seemed to be handling things surprisingly well now.

I guess when you spend most of your life being called crazy, actual craziness doesn't seem that bad?

Then there was the fact that it was our plan and we were in charge of it, even though she was an adult. Thankfully Tobias's mom doesn't seem like as much of an adult as most adults, but it was still weird. Jake had confessed to me that he was a little worried about what would happen if Loren decided to try and take charge of things, but we'd agreed that since most of what we had to do was going to be underwater where she couldn't follow us, it wasn't likely to be a big problem.

No, that was waiting for us once we got back to shore with somebody who knew our big secret. But nobody but me wanted to think about the problem we'd just made for ourselves, and it was too late to undo it now anyway.

Loren knew about the Animorphs. I just had to hope that wouldn't get all of us killed.

On the upside, maybe we'd all be eaten by sharks or murdered by Controllers before we got back to shore and we'd never need to worry about that. Yay.

"Did you all put on sunscreen before you morphed?" Loren asked suddenly.

We all stared at her. "Uh...no," said Jake.

"There's some in the port storage. Tobias, would you get that out and pass it around to everyone? Oh, and the cooler too. I brought sandwiches, in case turning into a bird makes you hungry!"

I hadn't thought the situation could have gotten more surreal, but I was wrong. Now there were sandwiches.

Okay, so I wasn't exactly complaining about the sandwiches. But it was still bizarre to sit there lounging against the transom of a boat thumping its way through the waves, munching sandwiches while racing towards near-certain-death in an attempt to rescue a crash-landed Andalite. Oh, and did I mention that we were following directions that Cassie got from a whale?

At this point I no longer know what normal even is, is the point I'm trying to make.

After a while, Cassie and Tobias switched seats so that she could help navigate using some waterproof charts that Loren pulled out. I was starting to enjoy the ride in spite of myself. The sun was warm, the spray from the waves was cool, and my belly was pleasantly full. As far as Animorph missions went, this was by far a high point.

Then Jake said, "How much further?"

"I don't know," Cassie admitted. "I...I guess I was hoping that when I was back in dolphin morph I would be able to make sense of more of the details the whale communicated to me. It was mostly images. And some of the images were about sounds and currents and water temperatures and stuff you can't see from the surface."

Loren nodded thoughtfully, as though that was a normal thing for a person to say. "Do you want us to stop so you can jump in and turn into a dolphin?" she asked. She was taking this all in stride disturbingly well. "We have all day, we can try several spots until we find the one you want." She frowned. "Unless you can't morph something more than once in a day? I'm sorry, I don't know what the rules are."

"No, we can morph as many times as we want," Jake reassured her. "Except that doing it tires us out. But there's not a hard limit. Well, except that we can't stay in one shape for more than two hours or else we risk getting stuck that way."

"That would be awful," Loren breathed. Her already-distant gaze drifted further away and her frown deepened, as though she was imagining some hellish situation which would leave someone trapped in a morph for the rest of their life.

I cleared my throat and said, "If we're close to where Cassie thinks we need to go, we might as well stop and check." I wasn't eager to get back into dolphin shape and jump into the dangerous ocean depths, but the sooner we got this done with the sooner it would be, well, done.

Jake nodded agreement. "Marco's right, let's stop and see what Cassie can tell from being in the water."

I saw Cassie wince when I mentioned that she was the one directing this little trip, and wince again when Jake talked about us relying on her sense of direction. I already knew that she didn't like the idea of her dreams being what had sent us out here, and I couldn't imagine that her being the one whom the whale had dumped his Marine Mapquest instructions on was making her feel better.

"Good," I said aloud as Loren cut the throttle, "I was getting tired of working on my tan. And none of you even remembered to invite the Baywatch babes. Totally uncool."

Cassie rolled her eyes at me and scooted to the side of the bow.

She took a deep breath. "Okay," she said, "here goes nothing."

She pushed off and dropped into the water, going under for a few seconds before she bobbed back to the surface. Did my heart clench momentarily until her tight brown curls popped back into view? Yeah, maybe. But I already knew I didn't like the ocean. It was no big deal.

Cassie started turning grey and her hair sucked back into her scalp and her nose elongated. "Wow," Loren breathed, "that's beautiful."

It was my turn to roll my eyes, because while even I couldn't deny morphing was cool there was no way any sane person would ever describe it as beautiful. Not even when it was Cassie.

Loren seemed totally sincere, though, hanging over the side of the boat to watch with wide eyes.

Cassie sank out of sight shortly after her dorsal fin sprouted. We all hung over the side now, waiting. After a while Rachel called, "Cassie?"

There was no answer. My arms started to itch as the hairs along them stood-up on end, prickling my flesh with goosebumps.

"Cassie! Are you there?" Jake shouted.

"I'm going after her," Rachel announced, and planted one foot on the gunwale. Before she could launch herself over the side and into whatever danger had its grip on Cassie, a sleek gray head broke the surface.

{I don't think we're there yet,} Cassie said. She sounded guilty and apologetic, and I don't think it was for worrying us with her failure to surface immediately. {I can't...I'm not feeling any...I don't know how to describe it. But we're not there yet.}

Loren, apparently having no problem being spoken to by a dolphin, nodded seriously. "Do you think it will be easier to direct me from the water?" she asked. "You could stay a dolphin and lead us that way."

I saw Jake and Tobias exchange a look. Tobias shrugged, then Jake shrugged.

"Let's try it," he said. "Cassie?"

{Okay,} said Cassie nervously. {Let's go, um...this way.}

She kicked off through the water, a sleek grey shape racing away between the waves. Loren cranked the throttle and followed.

I sat back, and tried not to think about how insane this plan was and how unlikely it was to work.

I tried even harder not to think about what we would do if it did.