All through the school day, in the back of her mind while she had been going about her normal, daily routine, Rachel had been fuming. She still remembered the headline; and sure, she knew that it was probably a good thing that neither she nor Shara had been mentioned at all, she was still annoyed when she thought about it. It was irritating on any number of levels, and she was also slightly annoyed with herself for being annoyed by it at all.

So, when Jake called her ever-so-casually on the phone and asked if she'd like to meet him and some friends down at the mall, she'd accepted gratefully.

Getting her mom to give her a ride was fairly easy, and once Rachel had told her that she was meeting up with Jake, Cassie, and some of Jake's friends, her mom smiled. She had always seemed to like it when Rachel was sociable. Of course, Rachel didn't really think that her mom would have been quite so pleased if she'd known that the people her daughter was meeting with were part of a small guerilla army that was the only thing standing between Earth and not one but two different factions of aliens determined to conquer it.

She sometimes wondered what the Radam's deal was: why they hadn't seemed to be making any forays into the outside world. She didn't know exactly what the Radam were capable of, though; maybe they were waiting for something, whoever was commanding them holding their forces back for some reason or other.

Maybe she'd ask Shara about that sometime, Rachel mused, as she got out of her mom's car and kissed the woman goodbye. Making her way into the mall, Rachel headed for the food court. On her way there, she spotted Cassie.

Her friend was carrying a pair of newspapers under her left arm, and without hesitation Rachel moved more quickly to catch up with her. She already suspected what this particular meeting was going to be about, but seeing Cassie and her cargo all but confirmed it.

"Hey, Cassie," she said, smiling as she fell into step beside her oldest friend and the two of them meandered over to the table where most of the other Animorphs had settled themselves down. "Nice to see you made it."

She sometimes wondered if she could have found a way to invite Shara to come with them sometime, since the other girl had to spend almost all of her time cooped up in Cassie's barn otherwise and anyone stuck in that position would probably be going a bit stir-crazy after all this time. She would have been thinking of some way to invite Slade, too, but he didn't seem to be as effected by his and Shara's confinement as anyone else would have been in their situation. Slade was kind of a strange guy, all things considered.

Though no one could deny that he was good in a fight.

"Hi, Rachel," Cassie said, keeping up their usual pre-meeting act of not having entirely expected to meet each other in this place. "I'm glad to see you made it, too."

As they moved in closer to the table where the others were sitting, Rachel saw that every other member of the Animorphs seemed to be there; even Ax, who was looking off to his right like he was just waiting for someone else to come back. All of the others seemed to be waiting, too, but none of them were as obviously eager as the Andalite. Ax was in human morph, of course, or else he would have run the risk of starting either a panic or a shoot-out in the mall; possibly both at once, considering how many of the mall's patrons might be Controllers.

Finally standing in front of the table that the others had chosen to sit at, Rachel put down her load of newspapers and huffed in exaggerated annoyance.

"Well, that's just classic," she scoffed, pulling out a chair so she could sit down quickly.

All of the papers shared the same front-page picture, and they all had nearly the same headline: Schwarzenegger Real-Life Hero: Gives Mouth-to-Mouth to Drowning Man. One of them had a different, and slightly more amusing, variation: Terminator Becomes Resuscitator.