When he'd managed to find Jake, Cassie, and the others, the first thing that Slade had noticed was the way Cassie had screamed in pain. Something had hit her, badly enough to leave her bleeding from both her eyes and her blowhole, but before Slade could go off to hunt down whoever it was, Jake ordered him to stay with Cassie.
(Yes, Jake,) he said, supporting Cassie as she demorphed to heal herself. (Something hit Cassie while we were out,) he said, seething for a moment, before he forced himself to settle down. (Everyone else sounds all right, though.)
(That's good to hear,) Shara said. (I'm glad Cassie's all right, too.)
(Yeah.)
~MM2~
"Jake, is this all really happening?" Cassie asked, feeling a chill of apprehension as she looked around.
(This is all real, Cassie,) Jake said.
The calm, clear water where there had once been choppy wavelets, bright sunlight where there had once been a storm… But, more than all of that was…
"Okay, then why is there a volcano over there?" she asked, finally managing to get the words out.
No one said anything, but Slade did at least stay with her while the others dove down and then leaped as high as they could.
(There is a volcano over there! An actual volcano! We don't have a volcano!) Rachel exclaimed. (People would have noticed that.)
(It'd have been all over the news, but that was definitely a volcano,) Tobias said, as the rest of her fellow Animorphs all gathered around her and Slade again.
(Could the explosion have caused it?) Jake asked. (Like, maybe the shockwaves from that bomb in the fissure caused a volcano to erupt?)
"We have to get back there!" Cassie exclaimed, already worried. "There might be people trapped, or hurt, or in danger!"
(There's no way that that volcano just erupted,) Shara said.
(Yeah, that cone's way too high, it takes hundreds of years of lava and ash building up,) Rachel said.
(How do you know anything about volcanoes, Rachel?) Jake demanded. (Did we learn about volcanoes in school?)
(Is that really important, right now?) Shara asked, in return.
(Excuse me,) Ax broke in. (But, something very large is coming toward us. A pair of creatures of some sort. I just echolocated them.)
(Probably just a pair of whales,) Rachel said.
(That might not be true,) Shara said. (The geography here is clearly different enough to have what's clearly an old volcano, close enough for all of us to see it. We're clearly not anywhere we've been before.)
(What do you mean, Shara?) Jake asked. (You think that explosion managed to blow us somewhere else, without killing us?)
"Um, you guys, what is that?" Cassie asked, already starting to morph back into dolphin, even as she slid down off of Slade's back.
(What?) Rachel asked.