- Narrator: Tobias
A woman named Aria searches for Tobias, claiming she wants to adopt him.
Tropes:
- A Birthday, Not a Break: Tobias's birthday (which he doesn't remember) is the day Elfangor's will is read to him, and also the day Visser Three plans to capture and infest him.
- A Child Shall Lead Them: Toby is a few months old and still a child by Hork-Bajir standards. Because she lacks the intelligence dampening that the Arn installed in the Hork-Bajir, she's smarter and wiser than all the adult Hork-Bajir around her, which makes her their leader by default.
- Aborted Arc: The subplot about Tobias suddenly seeing things from the rabbit's point of view while he's trying to hunt them is clumsily explained as some part of his human mind holding on to empathy, and doesn't come up in future books.
- Anti-Humor: Ax attempts a joke in response to "What's up?"Ax: <Up is the opposite of down. Although, of course, those terms are meaningless outside the context of a distinct, localized gravity field.>
- Bavarian Fire Drill: Tobias in Hork-Bajir morph gets the keys to Bek's cage by telling a Hork-Bajir Controller that the Visser wants to talk to him. Then he walks up to the cage, unlocks it, and takes out the guards with the help of the other Hork-Bajir he just freed.
- Black Gal on White Guy Drama: Discussed when Rachel lists all the ways she and Tobias are Star-Crossed Lovers. One example she brings up is Jake and Cassie being white and black, respectively.
- Coincidental Disguise-Complementing Trait: Tobias is meant to be pretending to be a self-interested delinquent throughout the big reveal, but he's left so shocked by the knowledge that his father was an Prince Elfangor that he loses all human expression... which ends up making him come across as bored and uninterested, exactly as an ordinary street kid would be on hearing this frankly insane-sounding claim that the dead father he never knew was an alien. Consequently, Visser Three is left so unimpressed by Tobias that he dismisses him as unworthy of infestation and lets him go free.
- Entertainingly Wrong: Visser Three thinks Elfangor would be ashamed of the "street trash" Tobias is. The reader has already seen Tobias from Elfangor's point of view, and the Visser couldn't be more wrong.
- Eye Scream: A Hork-Bajir named Fal Tagut turns out to have lost an eye to Tobias when they fought in the Yeerk pool in the first book when Fal Tagut was a Controller. He tells Tobias to not apologize, as it was personal only to the Yeerk.
- Heroic BSoD: After Tobias learn the truth about Aria, crash lands on the ground and stays there hating himself for believing he could have a family who cared.
- Hollywood Acid: The Kaftid that Visser Three morphs into has the power to spit acid that eats through wood in seconds. Tobias in Hork-Bajir morph takes a direct hit and runs around screaming in pain.
- Honor Before Reason: Tobias refuses to use his morphing power to get rid of the other hawk encroaching on his territory, even though this would scare it off sooner rather than later.
- Hope Spot: Thanks to Rachel's urging, Tobias lets himself believe that he could possibly have a home with Aria. It lasts until he sees her show up when Visser Three was supposed to.
- I Have to Go Iron My Dog: Aria makes an excuse to not adopt Tobias when she believes Tobias is just some street kid who a Yeerk would be wasted on.
- Inhumanable Alien Rights: The Hork-Bajir have freed more of their people offpage since the reader last saw them. Toby does this knowing that she'll need backup even after victory over the Yeerks, as she rightfully doesn't trust humans to have the Hork-Bajir's best interests at heart. Tobias can't fault her for it.
- Internal Reveal: As The Andalite Chronicles was released before this book, the reader is likely to know that Elfangor was Tobias's father, and was returned to the war by the Ellimist. Tobias himself finally learns about this in this book.
- Kill and Replace: Tobias catches the mother rabbit, acquires her, kills and eats her, and then morphs into her to raise her litter himself.
- Master Actor: Aria is a compassionate woman who loves nature and children. Visser Three is a psychotic despot whose general vicinity is bound to cause someone's death. One can only wonder the amount of patience the Visser had to muster to pull that one off.
- Menagerie of Misery: Bek is found in a roadside zoo, the type where large animals are kept in cages too small for them. After a few minutes in there, Rachel proposes morphing to grizzly bear, freeing all the animals, and attacking the humans running the place.
- Missing Child: A Hork-Bajir child named Bek is captured, not by Controllers, but ordinary humans who put him in a crappy zoo and treat him as a freakshow.
- Out-of-Character Moment: Visser Three shows some unexpected sides of himself, first running an incredibly patient, clever scheme to investigate Elfangor's son, then, when Tobias, pretending to be a tough street kid, bad mouths his father, wistfully telling Tobias that his father was a great man, and he should be proud to be his son.
- Properly Paranoid:
- Every Animorph finds something suspicious about a long-lost relative of Tobias's trying to adopt him. Predictably, it's a Yeerk plot.
- Visser Three plays the role of Aria flawlessly to fool any Andalite Bandit who could possibly be watching her.
- The Reveal: Aria is Visser Three in morph, trying to catch and infest the son of Elfangor.
- Spanner in the Works: Bek being captured by humans and nearly being taken by the Yeerks causes Visser Three's plan to find Tobias to overstretch, allowing Tobias to see the truth about Aria and not be fooled when they come face to face.
