"Wait, where is Ax?" he asked, after he'd landed on the hay-scattered floor of the barn and finished demorphing.

"That's what we've been trying to find out," Jake said, arms firmly folded across his chest.

"Ax was supposed to meet up with us in the forest, so that he could help us look for Rachel," Marco said, leaning slightly forward. "Even if there was some reason he couldn't make it, he'd know we'd be concerned, so he'd at least morph into his human form and meet up so he could tell us that he was okay."

"Sounds like he's not okay," Tommy said, feeling a chill as he himself settled down for a moment on a nearby hay bale.

"Yeah. Ax isn't okay, and Rachel isn't okay," Marco said, turning to Cassie. "What did Chapman call that monster of theirs?"

"A Veleek. A morph-hunter," Cassie said.

As it turned out, morph-hunter was a particularly apt name in this case, since it seemed as though morphing energy itself was what the Yeerks' new creature was hunting. And so, Tommy found himself wondering just what any of them were going to be able to do. Even as the meeting ended and he morphed into the barn owl he'd acquired for travel at night, Tommy hoped that the morph-hunter wasn't close enough to be a danger to anyone present here.

Pretty much all of them had agreed that he shouldn't reveal how close he was to the rest of the Animorphs, given the age gap between them, and also the fact that their social groups hadn't and still didn't overlap before all of this had happened. When Cassie's mother came out to speak to Cassie, Tommy was glad that he'd thought to morph before she arrived.