During the events of this chapter, Cassie has also experimented with morphing into a horse. Jake, Marco and Tobias are on their way over to her farm.

Spencer's Gifts, Hot Topic, Banana Republic, The Limited…every mall has the same set of stores, I swear it. Even the fairly original stores look the same. The dollar stores, the little shop full of retro t-shirts and hippy slogans and of course what mall wouldn't be complete without the arcade?

I was bored as soon as I got there. I checked out some cool dragon figurines at an art shop and there was a Walden Bookstore where I did a little reading. But other than that, there wasn't anything that really held my interest. In the arcade I blew a few quarters on Mortal Kombat, but I also remembered that Dad would expect me to save enough money for the bus back to the hotel and I didn't much time there.

As I looked at some movies in Sam Goody I wondered what Dad was doing. Did he meet his contact? And were they both safe trying to uncover this conspiracy. Wondering If Dad's contact was all right made it less selfish in my mind for worrying about him. Besides, whatever he was doing right now had to be tons more interesting than watching some ditz and her little friends gushing over the Backstreet Boys poster in the music section.

I ordered some beef lo mein and General Tso's Chicken in the food court. (There's another one; the family owned Chinese/Japanese restaurant) As I ate, I tried to put Dad and his work out of my mind. This was supposed to be a "fun" weekend after all. How is a kid supposed to have fun when he's worried about what his parents are doing?

My watch said one thirty. Dad said to hang out at the mall for a while. He didn't say I had to be there all day, just that I had to be back at the hotel before six. If I was going to be bored somewhere, I'd rather be bored in a place that has a TV and a pool. So with nothing better to do, I went back to bus stop on the east entrance. As I sat on the bench waiting for the bus, I looked out beyond the parking lot and a stretch of trees to what looked like a construction site.

Big deal? I thought.

Big deal but I was so bored. For some reason I'll never understand, I just wanted to take a closer look, so I left the mall parking lot. I had plenty of time before the next bus showed up and even if I missed it there would be another one in forty minutes.

Even as I got closer to the site, I wondered what it was that was drawing me here. If I was bored before I saw it, seeing that the site was mostly abandoned didn't make it any less boring. There was some pipeline sticking up from the ground, concrete and half finished buildings here and there and mostly a lot of garbage, broken glass and places where someone had started a camp fire.

I tried to avoid the puddles. Explaining mud on my shoes was going to be even harder than explaining my reason for coming out here if Dad found out.

Dad tries to tell the world of a senator was caught stealing money, I thought. Those people can hire other people to kill him just for that and I have to explain to him why I'm taking stupid risks?

Except that no one was going to care if I got hurt here. Maybe that was just it. Maybe I was just doing something that I couldn't explain, or wouldn't even bother trying. Sorry Dad, I went wandering through an old construction site. No real reason.

"Hey!" Someone shouted.

I turned to see a man staring at me. He was a grown up a bit shorter than my father, wearing an orange vest and a hard hat. He was standing near one of the half finished buildings along with three other guys wearing similar outfits.

"What are you doing here?" The guy asked.

"Um, sorry," I said, stepping back slowly. "I didn't realize there was anyone here."

"What difference does that make?"

He started towards me. My heart skipped a few beats from the shock, but I stood my ground at first, thinking he was just going to chew me out for trespassing and send me on my way. Worse-case scenario he would call the police and I would stick with my plan of not trying to talk my way out of it. Dad would probably ream me out and ground me when we got home, but it wouldn't interrupt his work at all if I got in trouble this one time so far away from home.

"Just let him go," another man said. "He's just a kid, he doesn't know anything."

I eyed the other man curiously. He had darker skin and was holding something in his hand.

"Can you take that chance?" The first one asked.

He grabbed me by the shoulder and forced me to move with the group. Since I wasn't making a move to run, I thought that was a little unnecessary. I began to struggle.

"Let me go!" I yelled.

He dragged me to the building with the rest of the group as the other three surrounded me. It's only when I got closer that I saw the device in the black man's hand was some kind of gun.

"We should take him to the pool," a third man said. "We'll know for certain then."

"Know what?" I asked. "I'm sorry, I just wanted to check this place out and I didn't know it was still open for business."

They ignored me as the guy holding me pushed me towards a utility van. I realized these guys might be connected to Dad's story. Reporter's kids are high on the list of priority targets for kidnappers, and if these men were involved in the kind of activity he was trying to expose, they probably had information about me.

So much for not interfering with Dad's work, I thought.

Thinking quickly, I looked down and saw that he wasn't wearing steel toed boots like a construction worker but black loafers. Acting on pure instinct I slammed the heel of my shoe into his foot.

He screamed in pain and lost his grip.

I bolted for the road. They shouted after me and I was suddenly grateful for the self defense classes I was forced to endure for three years after class.

I jumped over a ditch as a beam of red light struck the pavement near where I landed. The dirt and rock exploded and I threw my arms up to shield my face. Another beam barely missed me and struck a pipe. A cloud of vapor rose from the ground where the beam hit.

Lasers! Actual freaking laser guns! This was unreal! I took off, knowing that Dad was going to run into these people. I had to warn him and get him out of here before they hurt him. I turned to avoid the laser beams, getting further from the road as I ran.

"Get back here and we'll let you live, boy!" Someone yelled. Three beams sliced the air above me, striking a wall and sending brick everywhere. I jumped back to avoid getting struck and lost my balance.

As I hit the ground, my hand touched something flat. A strange tingling sensation passed through my arm, which was almost as strong as the pain that ripped through my spine. I moaned and tried to cry out for help.

"Where did he go?"

The men surrounded me now. The leader's foot was just an inch from my head and there was nothing covering me. Still, three of the four men looked around, sweeping their lasers and searching. I wasn't sure what was happening, but if they were suffering from a sudden case of blindness then I wasn't going to help them.

"Did we hit him?" The shorter one with the shaved head asked. He had lost his helmet somewhere in the run and was sweating.

"I had my beam set to stun," The leader said. "Even if we hit him at that setting it would have left a body. Check that pile, he must be hiding."

The two men walked past me, barely missing my arm by a few inches. I didn't know if it would make a difference if I moved or not, but I stayed put just in case. I tried to control my breathing and turned my head to see what it is I had touched.

My hand was on some blue box. It was covered in dirt and I couldn't quite make out what it was, but the tingling sensation stopped as instantly as it had started. Only the pain in my back remained.

The two others sorted through the rubble while the leader stood to the side, keeping his laser pointed at them in case I "jumped out" at them.

That's when I saw the dark skinned man looking down at me. His expression was serious and my heart pounded as I lay there in silence, hoping the other three wouldn't notice me as well. He didn't seem to be interested in telling the others that I was here, but then he was the one who suggested they let me go.

"My name is John," he said kneeling beside me. His eyes were on the other three.

"What's going on here?" I asked.

John helped me up, slowly, feeling along my back with his hand.

"You didn't break anything," he said, helping me to my feet. "Just take it for granted that they can't see or hear you right now."

I stared at him, not believing what I was hearing. "Take that for granted? How about the lasers, should I just take those for granted too?"

"They're called dracon beams. And I think you should take it for granted you are alive."

I couldn't tell if he was threatening me or not. But then, what was the point of threatening me? He had me by the…well, he had me cold.

"Larry!" John shouted.

I jumped as they swung around. Larry looked right at me and my heart stopped as I waited for him to blast me, but he just looked past me to John. John pointed and I followed his gaze past the damaged wall to …myself running in the opposite direction.

"There he is!" The others shouted.

While Larry, Curly and Moe continued to chase my doppelganger, John spun me around and looked me in the eye.

"What is your name?"

"Why should I tell you that?" I asked, trying to project a defiance I didn't feel. My body shook so badly that I wasn't sure I could walk and I desperately hoped that the wetness I was feeling was from sweat. "Shouldn't you guys have a file on me somewhere in your "Kidnap this Kid for Black Mail" cabinet?"

John chuckled mirthlessly.

"You're funny kid," he said. "But I think you're smart enough to know I could have killed you right now myself, or handed you over to Visser Three. Yeerks are opportunistic like that."

I stared blankly. Was any of that supposed to make sense-other than the compelling argument about the killing me?

"You're not an Andalite," he said, again, as if that was supposed to make sense to me. "But you're life is about to get complicated either way."

"My life was all ready complicated," I said, gesturing to three stooges chasing my apparition. "This tipped the scale from complicated right into a padded cell with no windows and no shoe laces. I mean, come on John. How much of this do you think I'll be able to tell them before they ask measure my neck for a straight jacket?"

"You need rest." John said. He looked out to the road then at me again. "The bus is coming. You're right, the Yeerks know about you but they don't know what advantage you just tripped and fell on. So go to your hotel, get cleaned up and get some rest. When your father comes back, tell him nothing of what happened here."

I looked down at my clothes, which were filthy. The pants were torn and my watch, the one my grandfather gave me for my birthday last year, was broken.

"How am I supposed to explain all of this?"

"You tripped and fell," John said, matter-of-factly. "And I hope you're a convincing liar. Your ability to live may depend on it."