"Applegate, Katherine A - Animorphs - 05 - The Predator (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Applegate Katherine A)

I took a deep breath. I braced myself. I took another deep breath.

"Okay, Jake," I said. "Let's do it."

The first mistake I made was standing in front of a full-length mirror.

It was dark in the room, but there was still enough light for me to see
the changes.

Big mistake. Morphing is never pretty. It is al ways unpredictable. In
fact, if you saw it happening and didn't know what was going on, you'd
end up screaming for about two weeks straight.

The first feeling was of shrinking. It's exactly like falling. Like
you're falling forever. I watched myself shrink in the mirror. It didn't
look as bad in the mirror as it felt.

But what really did look bad was my skin as it began to be covered by an
armor plate of brown cockroach shell.

"Aahhh!" I yelped in surprise.

My fingers melted together and formed a sin gle, many-jointed bug leg.
Antennae jumped out of my forehead. They seemed to stick out forever,

9 then curl back, like they were being blown by a wind.

My waist was squeezed, and the lower part of my body swelled, forming a
swollen insect abdomen. Swollen and brownish yellow with rip ples, sort
of like the Michelin man.

Then, when I was about a foot tall, I felt the last of my bones
dissolve. I could actually hear it happening. My spine had been grinding
as it shrank. Then, suddenly, I heard a squishy sound, as all my
internal organs lost their bone support.

My skull melted away. It was the last sound I heard clearly, as my ears
and human sense of hearing faded.

I was a bag of loose guts. Almost deaf. Half-blind, as my human eyes
shrank and the lenses became distorted.

My exoskeleton got harder and stiffer and stronger. My wings, glossy and
crisp, covered my back. They overlapped at the edges, like the metal
plates of a suit of armor.

Extra legs suddenly sprouted from my chest. Only it wasn't exactly a
chest anymore. I was a stunted, six-inch-long bug, with a few disinte
grating strands of brown hair and shrunken, but still somewhat human, eyes.