- Narrator: Rachel
Rachel becomes a temporary leader for the Animorphs while Jake is away.
Tropes:
- Attack! Attack! Attack!: Rachel's only real strategy when planning missions is to hit everything she can think of hard and fast. It doesn't work as well as she wanted, which gives her a crisis of faith in herself.
- Car Fu: The Animorphs steal a private jet and use to to crash through the building that leads into the Yeerk pool's hangar.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Rachel's idea of having all five present Animorphs attack The Sharing as polar bears goes awry because they can't adapt to a sudden change in circumstance, like the Inspector showing up.
- Fragile Speedster: Much to Rachel's frustration, the cheetah morph doesn't have the endurance to hold off a squadron of Hork-Bajir after grabbing an Andalite.
- Headbutting Heroes: Rachel reacts worse to Marco's sardonic comments about her strategies than Jake does, and to be fair, Rachel's strategies are worse than Jake's are.
- Logical Weakness: The Garatron's metabolism is as fast as the rest of it suggests. It dies from cobra venom in a minute, whereas humans and Hork-Bajir can survive for at least ten.
- Motor Mouth: The Inspector's dialogue has no spacing in its sentences to show just how fast he is on a regular basis. Keep in mind that Garatrons use thought-speech.
- Murder by Inaction: Visser Three does nothing but mock the Inspector after the latter is bitten by Marco's cobra morph.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Rachel has this reaction when she hears that the old man from the first of her raids died of a heart attack. And then again when Cassie is captured by the Yeerks.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Marco gives one as he catches the speeding Inspector with his cobra fangs.Marco: <You're fast, Yeerk. I'm faster.>
- Short-Lived Leadership: Rachel's leadership was only temporary to begin with, but she only gets the job because Cassie, Ax, and Tobias refused to lead and Marco refused to contest Rachel's self-nomination.
- Smug Super: As the only Garatron-Controller in existence, the Inspector is highly confident that he can take down the Andalite bandits while Visser Three can only gnash his usually-nonexistent teeth. His Super-Speed is enough to take down several polar bears, but his sheer horror after Marco bites him in cobra morph is well-deserved.
- Super-Speed: Garatrons are fast enough to run down cheetahs, and don't have to cool down afterwards.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Visser Three and the Inspector are both high-ranking Yeerks infesting unique hosts with unique abilities. It's not likely that they'd ever get along. Visser Three ends up leaving the Inspector to die at the end of the book.
- Underestimating Badassery: The Inspector dismisses Marco in favor of focusing on Ax. Any human would rather fight an Andalite than a cobra, but humans would most likely flee from the presence of a cobra rather than ignore one.
- Uriah Gambit: Visser Three goads the Inspector into fighting the Andalite bandits on his own, doing nothing to help. If the Andalite bandits win, the Inspector dies in shame several times over (a loss against an "easy" enemy, losing a valuable and unique host, and a potential member of the Council of Thirteen dead) and the Visser keeps his job. This is exactly what ends up happening.
- Walk on Water: The Garatron is fast enough to run across the Yeerk pool.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Marco gives a speech to Rachel after Cassie gets captured, saying that while he would have been a better choice to lead the raids, now they need Rachel's lighting-quick attack strategy before Cassie is infested or trapped as a polar bear.
