When they arrived at the Matcom building, landing as a small flock of owls then quickly demorphing to look for the pipe they were going to be entering through, Tommy found himself learning yet another thing about what Ax was capable of: it seemed that he had some kind of innate sense of direction. Of course, the Andalite was surprised that humans didn't have a sense like that, so it was probably a common thing for Andalites.

Tommy wondered about that, but not for long before he'd started morphing into the wolf-spider he'd acquired awhile ago.

(All right, let's see if we can do this,) he said, searching the spider's instinctive mind for the instructions that would start the body spinning silk.

Once he'd managed to find those, and Ax alongside him, the pair of them began spinning a long, silken thread for the rest of the Animorphs to climb down. Neither of them had any way of knowing just how deep they'd made it into the building when they started running out of silk, but since they were currently smaller than most of their other morphs.

Really, the only bugs smaller than them would have been flies, since no one was about to suggest ants again.

All of them landed as lightly as he'd been expecting, once they'd reached the end of the silk rope and been forced to jump off.

(Where do you think we are?) Jake asked, as the five of them gathered together in the darkness inside the vents.

(According to Erek, this is a heating-and-cooling vent; it's part of the furnace system. Erek said that we should head west for about a hundred feet or so, drop down, go across the furnace, drop down again, then head right. After that, we'll be right outside the High Security room. That's when the real problems begin.)

Cassie was uneasy about walking through the furnace, and to be fair so was Tommy, but he tried his best to reassure all of them as they made their way through the long expanse of the air vents. On their way through the vent, just after the first drop, they ended up being chased by a rat. A hungry rat, or maybe just one that had seen an opportunity to eat and wasn't about to let it go to waste.

That was how a lot of animals seemed to be, really.

It turned out to be, eerily enough, a good thing that they'd been chased by the rat: it meant they made it across the furnace itself before someone in the building turned it on. Tommy tried to be as reassuring about it as the younger Animorphs needed him to be, but coming that close to death when they hadn't even been fighting wasn't exactly comforting for him, either. He didn't say anything, of course; it wouldn't have done anyone any good right now, as tense as all of them were.

Considering what they were all going to be doing, all of them needed to be as prepared as they could, not tense the way they would have been if Tommy had said anything like that.