I stared at my history test, with a big 'C' written on the top of it. I used to care, at least somewhat, about my grades. Now I was just glad that the grade wasn't so low that I had to waste time with a retake. I didn't have the energy for that. And now that Zenguh was apparently back, I didn't have time for it, either.

I let out a big yawn, louder than I intended. Tobias and Ax had woken me up in the middle of the night at my house to let me know that Zenguh returned. It was hard to go back to sleep.

"Am I boring you, Jake?" my history teacher asked.

"No ma'am," I stammered, too tired to think of an excuse quickly on the spot.

She continued teaching, and I continued not listening, until the bell rang. I walked through the hallway to my locker. Cassie was there. She was smiling. I was not.

"Jake, you look tired," she said. "Are you okay?"

In a hushed voice, I quickly summarized the events of the night before. Cassie was no longer smiling.

"Well," she said after a moment. "He doesn't have the shard at least, so that helps."

"I guess," I answered, swapping out my textbooks in my locker. "But who knows where he's been, what he's learned, and which crazy aliens he's acquired."

Cassie was quiet, so I continued. The crowd of students passing through the halls helped disguise our conversation.

"He knows what Rachel looks like," I reminded her. "We have to act fast. If he finds her, he could find the rest of us through her, and if that happens…" I let it hang; we both knew that would be game, set, and match.

"He can still backlog his old morphs, he just can't absorb any new people at the moment," Cassie said, thinking out loud. "Rachel must feel really defensive and stressed right now. Don't you think?

"A bit, yeah," I answered, shutting my locker door. "But this is a stressful situation for everyone."

We walked to our next class, which we actually had together. Now I had to pretend to care about math.

"Another thing," I added in a low voice. "Tobias saw him in only two morphs last night. One of them was that kafit bird from Ax's planet. But the other was something that Ax told me was a Jubba-Jubba, a legend from the Hork-Bajir world. That means one of those is his current main body."

We turned the corner toward the classroom, and Cassie spotted Rachel on the other side of the hallway. I looked at her, and our eyes locked. Something was wrong. Rachel was weaving her way through the crowd of other kids, seemingly untouched as usual. Yet someone else was following the path she created.

Following her.

"Cassie," I said, nudging her arm. "Who is that kid behind her?"

The kid was shorter than Rachel, with a hoodie drawn up covering the face. I thought it was a boy, but he was so covered in clothes I couldn't tell. The distance between Cassie and I, and this mystery student and Rachel, was closing fast. Cassie and Rachel bumped shoulders as they passed, but she didn't say a word or look back.

‹Zenguh,› came Rachel's voice in my head. Cassie and I looked at each other, but we didn't noticeably react. We didn't want him to know who we were. Bad enough that he knew who Rachel was. This was an attack. I didn't know how Rachel was thought-speaking me as a human, but it was definitely her voice that I heard.

I pulled Cassie next to me, leaning casually against another set of lockers. My eyes followed Rachel down the hall…not in a weird way, though.

Suddenly, she stopped and spun around.

"Look," she said suddenly, loudly enough for the two of us and many passing kids to overhear the conversation easily. "You asked me out, and I said 'no', okay? If you keep following me, you're just being a creepy stalker!"

More kids stopped to witness the scene. Rachel pushed Zenguh, but this was not a place that Zenguh could react with a fight. A couple of other boys from one of our classes stepped between Rachel and Zenguh, who had fallen to the ground.

"Get out of here, weirdo," one of them said threateningly to Zenguh. He climbed up off the floor and left the hallway in a hurry, leaving the building through the school entrance.

Rachel and I gave each other a knowing nod. Cassie and I headed to class.

I faked interest for the rest of the school day. It was pretty tough, because I really wasn't interested in the slightest. Finally, it was over. Rachel, Cassie, and I took to the skies. We needed a coordinated effort, and the rest of our group. We were headed to the Hork-Bajir valley to meet Marco. In the meantime, I asked Rachel how she could thought-speak me as a human. I found out that her and Cassie had experimented a bit, and Rachel could essentially morph herself. I wasn't even mad that they had withheld this information, I was impressed.

‹That's the kind of thinking we need,› I said positively. ‹Zenguh is acting outside of the box. To beat him, maybe we should too.›

Luckily, it was not hard to get the six of us assembled around the campfire, and we added Toby, Erek, and Eva to our little group. Even with our combined experiences, we had a hard time coming up with an offensive strategy. I decided at worst, we would play defense until we had a better plan. For the rest of the meeting, we filled each other in on everything we all knew about Zenguh. The big key was that Zenguh thought Tobias was dead. Much like the David scenario a long time ago, we could possibly use that to our advantage.

A few hours later, around midnight, it was my turn to watch Rachel's house, taking over for Marco. We didn't know how much Zenguh knew about her, but since he found her at school, we couldn't take any chances.

‹This could be a long couple of days,› Marco said as he flapped away in owl morph toward the Hork-Bajir hideout. ‹Waiting around is tough. My Hork-Bajir excuse for a bed misses me.›

I agreed, but it was still my turn for the stakeout. I sank my talons into a branch on the tree in Rachel's front yard, watching for any movement. I was bracing for an all-out attack on her family, but hoped it wouldn't happen. After a while, I noticed a red-tailed hawk flying toward the house, emerging from the dark. He flew right up to Rachel's window, and tapped on the window with his beak. I knew Tobias and Rachel had a special thing going, so I stayed in the tree. I didn't want to intrude. I watched her bedroom window open from the inside, and the hawk flew right in.