"I'm not sure either of those narrows it down enough. But I guess we only need to find one, right, and then they'll be connected to others?"

"Yeah, that seems right. --Unless they're also telepathic. We just do not know enough." 

"Yeah. Poor dead alien couldn't tell us enough. I guess maybe out first priority should be figuring out how the powers work."

"That sounds right. But you're grounded."

"...yes. Yes I am."

"You could probably sneak out in the middle of the night. Especially if you turn into a bird or something to head somewhere else. Of course that interferes with, like, sleep."

"Sleep is important," Lev says. "Sleep-deprived people make mistakes. The three of us can experiment and report back, and you can try once you're not grounded."

"That gives the - Trill three whole weeks. But it might be the best we can do."

She is totally gonna test this in the dead of night anyway, just... in her room, probably.

"Got one," Asher says. "Quick, get it before it dies."

Lev touches the fly.

The fly goes very still. Lev gets the indescribable sense that something has passed from the fly to himself.

Karen touches the fly, too.

Sure. Flies are probably useful, if becoming one doesn't leave you basically brain dead and unable to remember that you need to stop being a fly at some point.

"The Trill have probably had more than three weeks already. --In the long term we'll have to figure out a way to survive without our parents, or stuff like this will keep coming up."

It's - easier to let go of her parents than she would have expected. She'll miss them. She'll really miss her sister. But once the Andalites come save them and blow the conspiracy open, it'll all be explainable anyway, so it's not like it's forever.

"Yeah, that's fair. We should be thinking about that, too. We're old enough to get jobs and stuff, so it shouldn't be that hard, right? I just want us to be thinking about timelines because we don't know when our deadlines are, but we do know that the only source we have thinks we've got less than a year  if we don't slow them down."

"If we can eat in morph and have that apply to our human bodies we might not need jobs."

"That's true. We can check that pretty easily."

"I have a car."

"That's... good, probably."

"I mean, you're talking about running away from home, so..."

"No, I mean, it's good. We'll probably be - more mobile than most kids anyway, at least if we can figure out turning into birds, but cars are useful too."

"We can live in a car, I mean, if we're homeless."

"Ohh. That makes sense, I guess."

She has no idea where she was picturing living but actually really doesn't want to live in a car with any of these people who she met literally yesterday. 

She pulls out her notebook.

"All right, so, to-do list. Experiment with morphing. Figure out whether eating in morph makes you less hungry out of morph. Probably morph something dumber than a cat but less dumb than a fly before we try flies. Test whether flies can hear things, if we think flies are safe. Think about all the stuff we would need to live without parents. Brainstorm which places the Trill are probably targeting and which of those places we can access and how. Figure out how to access more animals."

"That sounds right."

Gosh, Karen is so smart.

"Anything else?"