He finally managed to come back to himself, after falling so deeply into the ant's simple mind that he didn't even remember who he was, Tommy heard Cassie's thought-speak voice – seeming about as shaky as he felt right now – along with the rest of his fellow Animorphs.
(Hive. Ants are social insects; part of a colony, a hive. I should have guessed; I should have known. Ax is right: each of us is only a part, like a single cell within a human body.)
(Guys, I see other ants,) Tobias said. (They're coming your way.)
(How far out are they?) Jake asked. (Can you see them from up there?)
(I'm not up there,) Tobias said. (I'm standing right over you; you're a few inches from my right talon.)
He'd been sort of curious about the strange, sloping wall that he'd noticed when he'd come back to his senses – changed as they were by the morph he was in – but he'd been mostly focused on what Cassie and the others had been talking about.
(Guys? If you try, you can kind of use these ant eyes; at least a little,) Cassie said, sounding quite a bit steadier than he'd honestly been expecting, after everything that had already happened. (If you concentrate, you can notice light and dark. It's like watching a really, really bad black-and-white TV that's almost all snow, and you can only see what's right in front of you, but you can almost see a picture.)
As he followed along with the rest of his fellow Animorphs, passing the fence that bordered the Chapman home – though Tobias was the one who actually told them about it, since none of them were at all aware of something so big and so far away; not at their size, at least – Tommy found himself suddenly all too aware of the presence of enemies. Enemies of the ant he currently was, at least. He hadn't known just how much of an ant's world was based on scent, and Tommy would honestly have preferred not to find out.
Not under the circumstances, at least.
