"Nothing's wrong, Tommy," Jake said, his eyes sweeping over all of the gathered Animorphs. "I'm fine, don't worry."

"No way," Cassie said, firmly shaking her head. "We're taking you to a doctor. You didn't answer me for nearly five minutes! Maybe you have a concussion."

"Sorry I scared you, Cassie," Jake said, sitting up. "But I'm fine. Besides, where are you going to take me? Back to that hospital?" Jake asked; Tommy thought that was pretty reasonable. "What if some doctor does a blood-test and finds something that shows I'm an Animorph?"

"Not to mention all the damage we did back there," he said, thinking out loud for the benefit of his fellow Animorphs.

(I'm going back up,) Tobias said. (Make sure no one's after us, and see if Rachel and Ax are okay.)

"As soon as we know Rachel and Ax are okay, we need to break up and go our separate ways," Jake said, looking around at the four of them.

"I don't think there's all that much the Yeerks can do right now," Marco said, smirking. "We're deep in the national forest. It's take awhile for them to organize a search; they'd need helicopters and human-Controllers. And they still don't know what they're looking for. After all," Marco said, smirk growing all the wider. "They still think we're Andalites."

"Yeah, but that means that we're going to have to be very careful with Ax," Jake said. "We'll need to hide him. I think we may have parboiled quite a few Yeerks in that pool. They're going to be very upset."

Tobias, Rachel, and Ax all arrived then, but when Ax reached out to touch Jake's left shoulder, some kind of twitch passed over his face.

"Hey, Ax. you did great, back there when-"

Ax's tail, with its massively sharp, curved scythe of a blade at the tip, was at Jake's throat in what seemed to be only the blink of an eye.

(Yeerk!)