Birds

That day, the sun was bright. It warmed the earth below us. Warm air rose in an invisible bubble, a thermal. The thermal pushed up beneath our wings and we circled higher and higher and higher, till it almost seemed we could touch space.

[...]

On Earth, no one knew of the Yeerks. No one but five kids who were having fun being birds and riding the thermals.

I looked over at my friends. Some were a little way below, some were higher up. Jake was flapping his wings a little more than the rest of us. He had adopted a falcon morph. Falcons don't soar quite as well as hawks or eagles.

Tobias was the smoothest flyer. That was partly because red-tailed hawks are natural acrobats.

Partly it was because Tobias had much more practice flying than the rest of us.