- Narrator: Cassie
Rumors of alien technology held at Zone 91 reach the Animorphs' ears.
Tropes:
- All Part of the Show: The Animorphs and the Yeerks run into The Garden's parade, where they're mistaken for part of the show, even when the Yeerks cut their losses and flee in a Bug Fighter in full view of the crowd.
- Cool Horse: The Animorphs acquire racehorses in this book.
- Hellish Horse: Turns out the Yeerks can infest horses. They're not the most ideal host, but horse-Controllers can get into places that human and Hork-Bajir Controllers can't without raising suspicion.
- My Instincts Are Showing: Cassie may intellectually know what a racehorse should be trained to do, but her horse instincts get the better of her. For one thing, she gets upset at the smell of another stallion in the stalls, and suffers from claustrophobia at the racetrack's gate. She even starts talking to the jockey to explain what the horse is thinking as it runs.
- Nobody Here but Us Statues: The House of Horrors Ride is infiltrated by Animorphs and Hork-Bajir Controllers, both of whom pretend to be scary statues when civilians pass by.
- Off with His Head!: An unfortunate horse-Controller gets decapitated by Visser Three when he admits he saw the secret of Zone 91, but doesn't know what it is.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Marco, Rachel, and Cassie use the aliases Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and Cindy Crawford, respectively, when they're caught in Zone 91. Luckily for them, those names don't ring a bell for Captain Torrelli, who assumes they're being upfront.
- Sapient Steed: Cassie accidentally gets pulled into the horse race in the place of the actual horse that was supposed to be in said race. The jockey manages to not be too surprised when she starts talking to him.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: Played for laughs. In the end, nobody, not the Animorphs, not the Yeerks, nor the crew of Zone 91, accomplishes anything of value.We had done some very important things as Animorphs. We had fought some terrible and vital battles.
This wasn’t one of them - Worthless Treasure Twist: The secret of Zone 91 is in fact, alien technology. The twist? It's an Andalite toilet, and an obsolete model to boot.
