| #21: The Threat |
Detailed Plot: After falling from the helicopter in cockroach morph in the last book, Jake, Marco, David, Ax, and Cassie are snatched up by Rachel and Tobias who didn't make it inside the Blade ship. They return safely to the beach and demorph, and Tobias steals some clothes for David since he has no morphing suit. Then they decide that they will infiltrate the resort hotel where the world leaders are staying, and doing that will require morphing to seagulls. In figuring out how to get a seagull, Jake eventually tells Tobias to grab one for them to use (and he acquires it himself as well as letting David do so), but David makes some disturbingly comments during this exchange, like being eager about wanting to attack the seagulls himself in golden eagle form, and mocking Tobias for being a "racist" about different types of birds, and sort-of joking/sort-of not joking that they could use their animal morphs to get away with crimes. Jake is very worried about this guy being unpredictable. Flying around as seagulls, the Animorphs are unable to infiltrate. Security is everywhere, and one of the security guards is wearing Dracon beam-powered sunglasses that deliver a low-power charge to whatever he looks at. (He keeps looking at gulls who come too close, and chases off the Animorphs as well as some real gulls with this maneuver.) They retreat and Jake has to think things through. Back at his house, his parents tell him and his brother that his cousin Saddler has been hit by a car and it's very serious, and that after he gets stabilized and moved to a closer hospital, their family is going to be staying at Jake's. Jake isn't looking forward to his cousins invading while he's got to save the free world. Then Cassie calls and gives Jake a coded message saying that David, who had been staying in her barn, had suddenly disappeared. Minus Marco and Ax, they gather to look for him, and Jake tracks his scent by morphing into his dog morph. He follows his trail to a place where he turned into a lion, then into a golden eagle, and then they figure out from context clues that he broke a window and flew into a Holiday Inn room so he could sleep in the bed and use the television. Jake goes into the building as a human and knocks on David's door, and they have a little chat. David says more disturbing things, like that Jake isn't his boss and that "he" didn't break the window when he was an eagle; "a bird did it." Jake is worried because David is suggesting he does not have any responsibility for the things he does when he's not human. Jake delivers an ultimatum: David has to listen to Jake and obey the rules with regards to his morphing powers, or else Jake will consider David to be against them. He claims he's not threatening him, but really, he is. To infiltrate, Cassie has a plan. She explains that someone can morph a dragonfly because they have good vision and it'll be a good spying morph. But since dragonflies are more noticeable than the smaller insects they've morphed, a group of them would probably be suspicious. Cassie wants everyone except one person to morph fleas and then bite the dragonfly to hold on, then fly there like the dragonfly is an airplane. Tobias will fly the dragonfly with its passengers as close to the resort as he dares, then they'll do the rest. Jake draws the short straw, so he gets to become the dragonfly. Off they go on board Jake the dragonfly, and amidst their banter and planning and joking, David keeps telling them they're all crazy. They zip under a bellman's hat and hover for a while as the bellman helps a guest inside. When he tips his hat again they get out into the hotel and look for a place to demorph. Jake tries the air ducts, but they're hung up by a spiderweb--and the spider who lives there. He uses a partial demorph to try to get out of the web, but the duct is too small for them to use for actual demorphing, and it's a race against the morphing clock until they find the ballroom and take a chance demorphing there. Cassie was injured because when Jake did his demorphing trick she got ruptured by blood squirting out his artery into her flea body, but demorphing saved her. But Marco gets stuck part-way through demorphing from his flea morph, and Cassie talks him out of it until he's slowly himself again. Everyone thinks it's a miracle, and everyone avoided being trapped in morph, but now they have to figure out where the heck they are. In the ballroom, scarily, is a portable Yeerk pool. The Animorphs find out they're inside a hologram and it's designed to look like one of the ballroom's pillars. The Yeerk pool inside is protected by the podium/force field. While investigating how to get in and out of the pillar, Jake accidentally finds himself outside it (and therefore visible) when three people walk in. Jake hides under a table and overhears a guy named Tony--the guy who had a slashed shoe in the last book--telling a woman named Sheila that she needs to arrange for the President's table to be farther back and all kinds of various orders that Sheila argues were told to her differently this morning. Obviously two sets of orders are being given by Tony, who is identified as the White House Chief of Protocol. Obviously Visser Three's already gotten involved. After the group leaves, Jake goes back to the pillar and he and his friends decide to escape out of the pillar's ceiling opening. Jake decides not to hurt the Yeerks in the pool that are hiding there. He feels it would be wrong to hurt defenseless slugs, and figures his decision is both stupid and smart. But in order to complete an escape, they have to be sure security isn't watching the hologram roof, and surely they are, so Jake says they need a distraction and David volunteers to pull the fire alarm. Sadly, he trips and falls down, but the security bursts in much faster than they expected; of course Controllers would consider this room first priority since it contained their fellows in the portable Yeerk pool. David goes under a table and morphs a lion, and Jake stays behind to get him. But Jake doesn't want David to morph a lion; he thinks it'd be better for them to get small. He keeps trying to mouth "no" to David while the Controllers are searching the room, and after they see the Yeerks are okay, they believe no Andalites could have been in the room and figure it's a false alarm. When Jake finally manages to contact David, he manages to talk him into escaping instead of attacking (with David biting onto Jake as a dragonfly again), but he says something worrisome: "Who would win a fight between a lion and a tiger?" Hmm. The Animorphs discuss plans to interrupt the banquet and stop the heads of state from becoming Controllers. They wonder why the President himself was not kidnapped and infested, but figure maybe it's because someone as important as the President wouldn't be able to nip off to a Yeerk pool every three days for Kandrona rays. The guys think this makes sense, while Cassie suggests it's probably more about "personality" since it's likely to have something to do with Visser Three's ego--him wanting to personally be the one who is there to put the final nail in the coffin on the Earth invasion. They have a few hours before the banquet, but decide that some of them need to go home to avoid making their parents suspicious. Jake explains why that doesn't apply to him--his parents are out of town because of his hurt cousin--and since Rachel didn't know about it and Saddler is her cousin too, he explains about it and sees a funny look in David's eyes while they're talking about it. Jake privately consults with Cassie about how to figure David out, and Cassie says she can't really figure him out either. When it's time for the banquet, they morph birds of prey (except for Marco, who turns into David's cobra), and they all fly to their destination. Cassie, in owl morph, spots the President outside in shorts and comments on it, and they joke about getting his autograph. Since part of the roof is actually a hologram, they fly through it and into the projection of the pillar they discovered before, where they drop various weights onto the guards inside. They manage to knock most of them out, and Marco takes care of the last one by giving him a low dose of the toxin in his poison sacs. Then they wait. Jake, Ax, and David acquire the DNA of the knocked-out Controllers and take their clothes. The boys don't know how to tie a tie, but Rachel steps in and helps Ax take care of his clothes. It's not clear why they thought becoming the Controllers would be necessary, but as the banquet draws on, they're able to see the guests eating their meals, and they even see the President there in a tuxedo. Jake thinks it's odd that they just saw him in shorts outside, and wonders what he's missing. Then the speeches are supposed to happen and nobody gets yanked inside the hologram like they were supposed to. Suddenly Jake realizes it's a trap. He urges his friends to hurry into battle morphs. Visser Three has used holograms to trick the Animorphs, and though the plot is going to go on like normal, the banquet isn't until tomorrow night. When the Visser has the holograms turned off, they're there in battle morphs (except Marco is still a snake), surrounded by Hork-Bajir. He orders them to demorph while leveling a Dracon beam at them, and they all just wait for Jake's orders while Visser Three gets impatient, insisting that he'll start shooting them one by one if they don't demorph. David is the first to weaken and announces to the Visser that he'll defect and he doesn't care about the others, and Cassie has to stop him from running. Jake begins to suspect that maybe the Hork-Bajir aren't real, so he orders Marco to go bite them and he finds they're just air. Visser Three doesn't have nearly as much backup as he was pretending to. David ends up attacking Visser Three while Jake and Rachel deal with the human-Controllers who were hiding behind the Hork-Bajir holograms, and the humans are dumb enough to use their guns, which might attract real security. But Visser Three isn't just going to let himself get mauled by a lion, so he starts morphing some kind of space beast. Ax gets into the fight. The Visser starts asking which one of them is the human, since he knows David is probably one of them, and he starts baiting him by talking about his parents. When the real security arrives, they call an uneasy truce and both groups separate and back off. The battle has to happen at another time. Jake's trust in David is pretty much gone, and Marco's there to say I told you so. Silently, in thought-speak, Jake tells the others not to yell at David or discourage him. He wants them all to pretend to believe that David was only pretending to give himself up to Visser Three, but Jake believes they can't trust David and can't let him know. He's supposed to be in Cassie's barn for the night, but Tobias and Ax are watching him, and Jake sneaks out to lie in Cassie's pickup truck to help watch the barn. He believes that if David tries to leave, it will mean he's a traitor. And just when he thinks maybe he was wrong, he sees an eagle leaving the barn. Ax has spotted him. They follow David to the ruins of his old house, though somehow they lose contact with Tobias during the process. David is watching TV when Jake comes in and talks to him. David wasn't planning on turning himself in to the Yeerks, but he IS planning on using his powers for his own gain and NOT taking orders from Jake anymore; he felt threatened and doesn't want to just be part of Jake's army. Then he reveals that he has killed Tobias, and Jake sees the dead bird body lying on the bed. He certainly appears to be dead. And then David attacks Jake, but David's morph is larger and can't fit under the bed where Jake is hiding. Hork-Bajir who were watching the house join the fight, and Ax has to rescue Jake. David morphs too and takes off after Jake, and Jake orders Ax to go get Rachel. Once on a rooftop where they're both forced to demorph due to the time limitations, David gets the fight he was wondering about: tiger versus lion. And it all seems like it might be over with when David knocks Jake through glass and they're falling while Jake is bleeding from a serious wound. He begins to lose consciousness, and another cliffhanger ends the book. Narrator: Jake New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: Flea Rachel: Flea Ax: Human (security guard) Tobias: Seagull David: Seagull, flea, human (security guard) Notable: It's a nice touch that people who got knocked unconscious by a blow to the head didn't stay out long. Normally, the amount of time a person can be unconscious after a head injury is not very long unless it's a very serious injury, and these books are written in such a way that the Animorphs don't irrevocably injure people if they don't have to. So after initially being knocked out and only staying out for a couple minutes, one Controller has to be bitten with poison to stay unconscious. That's refreshing. At one point the Animorphs have a plan that involves three of the guys--Ax, Jake, and David--acquiring and morphing the human-Controllers. They planned to explain to each temporarily abducted world leader that there's an alien invasion going on, and have Ax demorph to show them. Why would they do that when a) there were other ways to prove it with other people's morphs and b) they'd bothered to put Ax in a tuxedo and tie his tie? When David does his lion morph and Jake has to restrain him, Jake realizes a second too late that David has never done the lion morph before and so he stands a very good chance of losing control of it. The problem is that earlier in the book Jake tracked him down while sniffing as a dog, and determined that he changed into a lion to cover some distance. It might have been the first time Jake had been around David while he was a lion, but it wasn't David's first time in lion morph. Best lines: Jake: Stale dog poop was only slightly more interesting than cat poop. And let's face it: No one cares about cat poop. Jake: This wasn't as fun as chasing a stick. But it was some kind of game, at least. And I liked Cassie. If only she had a stick.
Ax: "I have to ask: What is a hat?" Jake: Some decisions are smart. Some are dumb. Some manage to be a little of both. This was one of those.
Ax: "Yes. Obviously in that one area, the technology the Chee possess is somewhat superior even to Andalite technology."
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