The Separation by K. A. Applegate

Author:K. A. Applegate [Applegate, K. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0439070325
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
Published: 1999-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17 - Mean Rachel

I was early to the barn. Suddenly it occurred to me: I could spy it out! I should have thought about that earlier. Only why bother to load up your brain with a bunch of "what if?" stuff? The future is not my problem. Live for today, fight for today.

I morphed to fly. Not as cool as a big raptor, maybe, but with its own weird powers.

I did it in the barn itself. Why not? No one else was there. They'd just be getting out of the yawn factory.

I stood there, surrounded by creatures of the wild: fierce raccoons, aggressive geese, and rabbits that . . . well, there wasn't much good to say about rabbits.

I focused my mind on the morph.

My skin blackened and crisped. You know, like I'd been burned to overdone marshmallow consistency? Only instead of mushy marshmallow consistency, this was like fingernail.

My body squeezed into three portions. My head was a BB resting atop a muscular abdomen. Below that my waist pinched tight above a growing, swelling thorax.

My arms became sticks. My legs extended out and out, thinner, thinner and yet incredibly strong.

Two new arms burst from my chest.

<Hah HAH!> I laughed gaily. <Let my wimpy twin try this some time. She'd go insane!>

All the while I shrank and shriveled and seemed to fall toward grains of sand that became boulders and pieces of straw the size of felled telephone poles.

Suddenly my blue eyes inflated like balloons. The blue iris turned glittery black. My eyeball itself was shattered into thousands of tiny facets, each a sort of separate eye.

Very cool.

My weak human mouth, pale lips, and blunt, tiny teeth, became the long sucking-tube of the housefly.

I tested my wings. I was airborne in an instant. A totally different type of flying than an eagle, of course. An eagle is a killer. A fly? A fly eats dog poop.

Ah well. A hunter, a killer; a soldier must do what a soldier must do.

I flew, wild and bobbly and blown by any stray air current, but I made it to one of the crossbars of a cage. I rested there, waiting.

I didn't have to wait long. But it wasn't my friends who arrived first. It was a boy who seemed, to my fly senses, to be a blurry explosion of weirdly colored light.

Erek. His hologram was not designed to fool the fly's compound eye.

The android looked around, switched off his hologram, and now seemed to be nothing but a pile of steel and ivory. The colors were still off - the fly eye sees the color spectrum differently.

If the Chee was here waiting, he had news. Important news.

Pathetic creature. He had deliberately chosen to resume his pacifist programming. We had freed him to be a warrior of such great power that not even I would ever have challenged him.

And yet, in his moment of glory, having done more destruction in two or three minutes than we had done in months of missions. Having littered

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