Once they'd managed to make it through the maze of wires – the bat's echolocation did remind him more than a little of being a dolphin, something Tommy was fairly sure that the rest of the Animorphs felt, too – Tommy sighed as well as he could through his tiny bat lungs.

(One of us could try picking it up with their feet,) he said, breaking up the argument that looked like it might have been starting between the other Animorphs about how they should handle the crystal. (Bats perch, don't they?)

(We could try that,) Cassie said, sounding more than a little embarrassed; Tommy wondered if she was thinking she should have thought of that first, but he wasn't going to push.

Cassie was the one to pick up the crystal with her little bat feet, but as soon as she'd lifted it up and away from the pedestal it had been sitting on, alarms started blaring all around them.

(Great, looks like they had that angle covered, too,) Marco grumbled, as the five of them settled around the pedestal for a moment.

It went without saying that they were going to need to be in combat morphs to have a hope of escaping the room they were all currently trapped in, so Tommy quickly hopped down off of the pedestal and started demorphing. He could hear the rest of his fellow Animorphs all doing the same around him, and soon enough Tommy was back in his lion morph again. He had no way of knowing just what kinds of forces the Yeerks would have inside this place, so he went into his lion morph as fast as he could.

Rachel took point, the way she usually did, and they all charged out of the door and into the darkened interior of the main building. The building looked so normal, once they were out of the crystal room, but it was just the same with the Yeerk forces they were fighting. They all looked normal, until they started attacking.

Entirely too soon, the Tommy and the rest of the Animorphs found themselves confronted by the Yeerk forces in this particular building: twenty human-Controllers, and twenty-four Hork-Bajir standing right behind them.

Too many, as Marco had said.