I know it seems impossible even to conceive of Andalites as traitors. I know the very idea makes any decent Andalite sick inside. But I am telling the truth. The Ascalin incident happened. We were betrayed by one of our own.

Quite the introduction, that.

Another high level person threatened with a Yeerkening. A mad plan to get in and turn it to their advantage…

And then suddenly yoink. You’re in a war on another planet, a billion miles away.

Turns out even vanishingly unlikely things can happen if you’re the protagonists of a book!

It’s a neat book. Shades our relationships with the Andelites a bit more, gives Ax some hard choices to make, and perhaps–just perhaps–gets a good word about what’s going on on Earth to someone that may be able to help.

Random thoughts. Spoilers.

felt Tobias grow tense. Now he was beginning to understand. But he said, <Sometimes people must take animals off the home world, right? I mean, just the way you can find an African lion in a zoo in America, Europe, wherever. Right? So, okay, someone totally innocent takes one of these birds off your planet. They get hijacked or whatever. And it ends up in Visser Three’s hands.>

Or… his host could morph it before Visser Three set up shop?

This one kind of bothered me.

<Diseases cannot be transmitted during acquiring,> I said quickly. <The acquiring process absorbs only DNA, and that DNA is isolated, encapsulated within your own bloodstream in a super-low temperature - and thus very…

Huh. This feels like midi-chlorians. Something that’s probably better not being too accurately portrayed.

But now that they have… does your body replicate this DNA? Does it go with you to every morph? Can you bleed it out?