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of all.”
    “Why me?”
    He hesitated. “Geez, Jake, don’t you understand? I know what I can do and what I can’t do. I can’t make plans and tell people what to do. I’m not the leader. You are.”
    I laughed rudely. “I’m not the leader of anything.”
    He just looked at me with those deep, troubled eyes—eyes I can now see only in my memory. “Yes, Jake,
you
are our leader. You are the one who can bring us all together and help us defeat the Controllers. We have the ability to be much more than we are, to have the stealth of a cat, and … and the eyes of eagles, and the sense of smell of a dog, and … and the speed of a horse or a cheetah. We’re going to need it all, if we have any hope of holding out against the Controllers.”
    I wanted it not to be true. I wanted none of it to be true.
    But I knew that it was.
    I nodded slowly. It felt like I was agreeing to something awful. Like I was volunteering for a trip to the dentist or something much worse. It felt like a million pounds of weight had just landed on my shoulders.
    I knew what I had to do next.
    “Well,” I said grimly. “I guess I’d better go find Homer.”
    Homer. That’s my dog.

CHAPTER 9
     
    I t isn’t painful. Morphing, I mean.
    I petted Homer for a while, feeling like a complete and total fool. “This is the stupidest thing I have ever done,” I told Tobias.
    “Look, you have to concentrate. At least, I did. I mean, I formed this mental picture of Dude, right? I thought about becoming him.”
    “I see. So I have to, like, meditate on becoming a dog.”
    “That’s right. You have to think about it. You have to
want
it.”
    Normally I would have figured he was nuts. But Ihad just seen him turn into a cat. So if
he
was nuts, so was I.
    I thought about becoming Homer. As I stroked his fur I formed a picture in my mind of me
becoming
Homer. Homer became weirdly quiet while I did it. Like he was asleep, only his eyes were open.
    “Just like Dude,” Tobias commented. “I think the process kind of puts the animal in a trance or something.”
    “He’s just scared because he thinks his master is a looney tune.” I continued stroking Homer’s fur and concentrating, and Homer continued to lie very still. “Okay, now what?” I asked Tobias.
    “Now we better put Homer outside. He might get slightly freaked by watching you turn into him.”
    It took Homer about ten seconds to come out of his trance. But then he jumped up, normal, hyperactive Homer again. I put him outside in the yard.
    Tobias was sitting patiently when I got back, just waiting. “Give it a try,” he urged me. “Think about it.
Want
it.”
    I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. I recalled the picture of Homer I’d formed in my mind. I thought about becoming Homer.
    I opened my eyes. “Bowwow,” I said, laughing. “Guess it didn’t work for me, Tobias.”
    The back of my hand itched and I scratched it.
    “Jake?” Tobias said.
    “What?”
    “Look at your hand.”
    I looked at my hand. It was covered with orange fur.
    I jumped about a foot, straight up in the air. “Ohh! Ohh! “ I stared at my hand. The fur had stopped growing.
    “Don’t be scared,” Tobias advised. “Go with it. Now you’ve stopped the morph. You have to concentrate.”
    “My hand!” I said. “Fur!”
    “Yeah, and your ears …” Tobias said.
    I ran to the mirror over my dresser. My ears had moved. They had slid up the side of my head, and were definitely larger than they should be.
    “Go on, it’s so cool!” Tobias said.
    “Cool? It’s … it’s … creepy. It’s weird. It’s … I mean, look at my hands! I have fur!”
    “You have to do this,” Tobias said.
    “I don’t
have
to do anything,” I said sullenly.
    Tobias nodded. “Okay, you’re right. You don’t
have
to do this. You can just forget what we saw last night. And forget what we know. And as the Yeerks take over more and more people, you can just ignore it. We can all just go along and grow up in a