Condensation dripped off the plastic of Reena’s large strawberry boba milk tea and puddled in the crease of her tennis shoes. The printed document in her lap had been branded with a big ugly I in harsh red pencil. 

I for Inadmissible.  

It might as well have been an F.  

Beside her on the park bench, Jim Taylor shifted nervously and swirled the ice leftover in his cup. “Was I right to show you?” His summer blue eyes looked worried behind his glasses.  

Reena ran her fingers over the document, feeling the bump and curve of the printed text on the page. “Of course you were right to show me.” Her voice trembled.  

Jim sighed. “I know you’re disappointed, Reena. I’m sorry.” 

Reena set her cup on the bench and turned to him. “What did I do wrong, Jim?” 

“Reena.” 

“I practiced. I trained.” She ticked each one off on her fingers. “I lifted weights. I worked on the balance beam and all the different obstacle courses. For months. And I still wasn’t good enough to pass the field agent exam?” 

Jim set his glass down in the grass and took her hand in his. “Reena, it’s not about being good enough.” 

“Yes, it is.” She held up the document. “Inadmissible, Jim. I’m not good enough to be a field agent for Peregrine. Even you passed the field agent exam.” 

Jim blinked and laughed. “Even me, huh?” 

Reena sagged. “You know what I mean.” 

“Reena, I barely passed.” Jim smiled at her gently. “And the standards were different then.” 

“You’ve only been an agent for four years. How different could they be?” 

“Significantly.” Jim’s face darkened.  

That was all he would say about it. Reena knew his expressions well enough to spot a sensitive topic.  

“But I was an analyst for much longer,” he said. “I was support staff for the field agents for a long time, Reena. I made a difference that way. It’s still special. It’s still something very few people can do.” 

She gazed at the document in her lap. “I want to do more, Jim.” 

“I know.” he patted her knee. “And I know you’re tired of hearing this, but you’re still young. You’re barely fourteen, Reena. You have a long career ahead of you, and you don’t need to be a field agent at Peregrine to succeed.” 

She lifted her eyes to his. “I want to be like you.” 

Jim sighed. 

“You taught me everything, Jim. I want to be a field agent like you, because that’s where you can do the most good.” 

“Reena.” 

“And I’m tired of people having to take care of me,” she said. “People always have to take care of me, and they shouldn’t have to. I should be able to take care of myself.” 

Jim gathered her other hand in his. “Reena, listen to me.” He took a long breath and exhaled. “You have the most gifted mind of anyone I’ve ever met. You see patterns where everyone else sees normality. You develop creative solutions where everyone else gives up. I am so proud of how much you have learned.” 

“But I’m not strong, Jim.” Reena pulled her hands back. “I can’t do the things other people do.” 

“So what?” He chuckled. “Nobody can do what you can.” He shrugged. “You can’t be good at everything, Reena.” His eyes sparkled. “That’s Barb’s job.” 

In spite of herself, Reena smiled. Jim had a point. His older sister really was good at just about everything.  

Jim squeezed her hand again. “I know you’re disappointed, Reena, and I’m sorry for that. But I’m not sorry you’re going to stay an analyst for a little while longer. The longer you stay, the longer we get to keep working together.”  

“That’s true.” She sat back. “If not for my data mining, you’d have been in big trouble in Paris last year.” 

“We were already in big trouble.” 

“It’s not my fault you can’t climb national landmarks without falling off them, Jim.” 

Jim laughed and sat back against the bench seat. He tilted his face toward the sky, and the gentle breeze lifted his blond hair out of his eyes.  

He glanced at her. “You gonna be okay?” 

She nodded. “I’m always okay.” 

He raised an eyebrow. 

“Yes, Jim, I’ll be okay.” She handed the document back to him. “I still want to be an agent, though. So maybe I’ll try again next year.” 

A flash of uncertainty flickered across his face before he offered a forced smile. “You never know what might happen.” 

Reena turned away from him and swallowed the anxiety building inside her. Did Jim think she shouldn’t try again? Did he think she would fail again? 

He bit his lower lip for a moment before he spoke. “It’s better this way, Reena. Trust me.” His smile grew more genuine. “Being the smartest or the strongest isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just be good at what you’re good at.” 

Reena tried to smile back. It sounded so easy when he said it, but the idea of letting go of the dream of being a Peregrine Agent didn’t feel better. Not even close. 

“Are you sure you can’t stay longer?” She took another sip of her boba tea to cover the tremor in her voice.  

Jim glanced at his watch. “I can’t. I wish I could, but duty calls.” He stood up. “Need a ride home?” 

Reena nodded toward her electric scooter parked against one of the flowering crabapple trees. “I’m good. I think I’ll stay and soak up the sunshine while I can.” She smiled. “It’s spring in Kansas. You never know from week to week if you’ll have a blizzard, a thunderstorm, or a tornado.” 

Jim stood up and set a hand on her shoulder. “You sure?” 

Reena forced the burning in her eyes away. “I’m sure. Thank you. You didn’t have to come all the way out here just to tell me the bad news.” 

Jim’s smile felt warm. “Yeah, I did.” He raised his eyebrows. “And besides, I wanted one of your mom’s cinnamon rolls.” 

Reena smacked his arm as he laughed.  

He walked toward the rented car he’d parked in the cul-de-sac, but he stopped as he reached the edge of the landscaping.  

“Reena?” 

She looked toward him.  

Jim held her gaze somberly. “There’s more than one kind of strength. You know that, right?” 

“Yeah,” she said. “I know it.” 

He didn’t stop staring at her. “But do you believe it?” 

She took a slow breath and let it out. “I’m trying to.” 

Jim’s answering smile warmed her again. “Good.” He saluted and walked toward his car. He started the engine and drove away. 

Reena settled back against the bench and sipped her boba tea, enjoying the creamy strawberry taste and the chewy tapioca pearls. Jim had gone so far out of his way to tell her that she’d failed the exam. Flying from San Francisco to Wichita, Kansas wasn’t exactly an easy thing to pull off, even with a private jet. 

Reena regarded the document in her lap again. 

Jim was right, of course. There were more than one ways to be a success at Peregrine, but being a field agent had always been the pinnacle of achievement. Analysts were a dime dozen, no matter how Jim tried to make her feel special. 

Jim was one of the only full-time analysts who ever passed the field agent exam, so he was something of a legend. And he was older—seventeen to her fourteen. And taller—six feet to her barely five.  

But she’d given her all to the exam, and she’d still failed.  

She hadn’t told her parents yet. They would be so disappointed to find out that the investment of time and energy and financial resources they’d given had been a waste. Reena was a Peregrine analyst, and apparently that’s the best they could all hope for. 

She gripped the document in her lap. “I’ll find a way,” she muttered to herself. “I’ll find a way to prove that I belong at Peregrine. Jim believes in me. I have to show him that he’s right to believe in me.” 

The impact came out of nowhere.  

SQUISH! 

Something warm and gooey and wet hit the side of Reena’s face hard enough to send her reeling sideways on the grass. Squealing in shock and disgust, she swiped at the gross-smelling lump of fleshy vegetable stuck to her cheek and hair.  

A tomato? Ugh. And a rotten one at that.  

She stood up, shuddering, and shook herself, the earthy too-sweet smell of bad tomato clinging to her.  

“You look better in red, Ellis!”  

Reena stopped flailing to get the bad vegetable off her face and clothes and turned her gaze to the front of the park where Mandie Beaumont leaned against the flowering crabapple tree.  

Oh, great.  

Mandie smirked at her with her perfectly straight teeth in lips stained with glittering cherry lip gloss. She held another seeping tomato in her hand.  

“I saw you over here chatting up your boyfriend and thought you might need a snack.” Mandie shook the gooey tomato at her. “That big fat brain of yours can’t run on empty.” 

“If anybody here needs a snack, girl, it’s you.” Reena picked up her book and brushed the tomato skin out of it. “But you don’t snack. Right, I remember. You’ll just throw it up later.” 

Mandie stepped forward and chucked the second tomato at her, and Reena blocked it with the cup of boba tea. The tomato hit with a sickening FWLOHP, and her tea splashed out all over the grass. 

Reena rolled her eyes. “Is that really necessary?” 

“No.” Mandie leaned on the tree again. “But I had two rotten tomatoes, and I couldn’t think of anything better to do with them.” 

Reena huffed and stomped toward her scooter where it leaned against a tree on the other side of the small park.  

“What are you even doing here?” She threw the empty boba cup into the trashcan angrily. 

“My dad’s auntie lives over there.” Mandie jerked her head toward a modest home across the concrete drainage ditch next to the park. “Mom makes me spend a day with her every week, and the old witch makes me weed her garden.” 

Reena strapped on her pink elbow pads. 

The grass crunched under Mandie’s rhinestone-studded Converses. Reena strapped her elbow pads on faster and kicked up the stand on her scooter, wheeling it around toward the sidewalk. Mandie blocked her, hands on the steering bar.  

“So who was the cute white boy? Hm?” Mandie sneered. “How did someone as nerdy and ugly as you get his number?”  

“Go away, Mandie.” 

Mandie was taller than she was by six inches, and the height of her long dark hair styled on top of her head didn’t help. She was older too, by almost a whole year. 

“Move, please.” 

Mandie narrowed her blue-gray eyes. “No.” 

“Please?” 

“Oh, you even said the magic word.” 

“Stop messing with me.” Reena jerked the steering bar, but Mandie didn’t let go. 

“What are you going to do about it? Tell your daddy?” Mandie made a pouty face at her. “Some Peregrine Agent you are. You can’t even defend yourself against a tomato.” 

Reena cringed inside and tried not to show it on her face. No need to tell Mandie she’d failed the agent exam. No need to give her further ammunition. 

Reena wrenched the steering bar away from her just as Mandie released it, and Reena tumbled backward, flopping ungracefully on her backside, half on top of the scooter and half on the grass. 

“You’re such a loser.” Mandie laughed, stepping over her and onto the sidewalk. “Stick your nose in every book you can find, Ellis, but you’ll always be a loser. You getting into Peregrine was a total fluke, and they’ll realize you’re a fake sooner or later.” 

Reena got to her knees and stood up, feeling a definitive bruise forming on the back of her leg where she’d landed on her scooter tire. 

Mandie strolled toward the drainage ditch, heading back toward her auntie’s house.  

Reena glanced at the fleshy lump of seeping tomato still near her on the grass. It was still solid enough to throw, and it was only fair that Mandie got a taste of her own medicine, wasn’t it? 

Reena scooped up the soggy mass of smelly tomato.  

Calculate wind speed. Angle of approach. Necessary speed to counteract the distance. And the perfect place to sink it. 

Reena took aim and hurled the tomato at Mandie’s back as hard as she could. The dripping wad of tomato splashed against the back of Mandie’s head with a wet THWAP Reena could hear from where she was standing.  

Mandie shrieked in surprise and lost her balance, tipping over sideways into the murky brown drain water. She sat in the filthy water as it burbled and churned with dead bugs and leaves and screamed, rivulets of brown running down her arms and legs, soaking into her white shorts and her cute little tank top. 

And her perfect hair even come loose.  

Reena flashed a V for victory at her with a grin as she shoved her pink helmet over her braids. 

“I’ll kill you, Ellis!”  

“Then I really will tell my dad!” Reena hopped on her scooter and pushed off the sidewalk. 

Mandie’s screaming sobs faded behind her.  

Reena guided her scooter southward down Chataqua Street toward Second where she hopped up onto the sidewalk and continued east. 

Mandie needs to know she can’t mess with me. Reena gripped the bright pink rubber handles on the steering bar. She’s bigger and older and stronger, but I can stand up to her. I can take her.  

She guided the scooter around a crack in the concrete and yelped as her helmet smacked the branch of a passing Bradford pear tree. She wobbled and came to a stop, shaking the nasty-smelling petals out of her braids.  

She walked the rest of the way to the intersection and used the crosswalk as soon as the light indicated it was clear.  

But I don’t know how to fight. At least, not without a rotten tomato. She frowned.  

In the moments when she and Jim and Barb had faced danger, she’d been totally dependent on them to protect her. Barb protected everyone, so that wasn’t unusual. But Jim wasn’t a fighter either. Yet he was still more capable in a fight than Reena was.  

Just like the field agent exam proves.  

Her dad could fight. Her dad had been a Marine. Her brother was a Marine. Her mom’s dad had been a Marine. And her dad’s family? Well, that was another story. But she came from a family of fighters, great warriors, and she got taken down by a tomato? 

What kind of legacy was that? How was she could to live up to the standard her family had set? Her mom’s family was one thing; her dad’s family was something completely different. 

“I have to get stronger.” Reena stepped back onto her scooter on the other side of the intersection and pushed off again. “I have to be stronger.” 

She winced to herself.  

Jim hadn’t mentioned the other world in their conversation. They’d kept the topic focused on current events, but it was something they would need to discuss again soon.  

She hadn’t told her parents about the other world and its talking fox people and aliens with laser swords—or the three humans who had grown up there. Meg Mitchell and her family needed to stay a secret, just like the other world did.  

It had been a freak accident that she and Jim had even discovered it.  

There are so many secrets. She pressed her hand against the side of her face. Secrets from Mom and Dad. Secrets from Jim. 

Jim still didn’t know the truth about her and her family’s heritage, but not many people knew that. And the fewer people who knew, the better. But if anyone deserved to know that her family came from another planet, wouldn’t it be Jim? Her mentor? Her friend? 

Reena took the corner on Rutan Street and glided up the driveway of their house. She used the remote she’d attached to her wrist guards to open the garage door. She loaded her scooter into the crate she’d built for it and stomped up the stairs into the house. 

Neither of her parents’ cars were in the garage. She checked the family calendar on the wall as she entered the house.  

Her mom was working a double shift at the hospital.  

Her dad had taken her older sister out for her sixteenth birthday lunch. 

Perfect. Nobody was there to witness her bedraggled, tomato-stained walk of shame. She turned through the brightly lit kitchen and stripped off her helmet and elbow pads, depositing them on the marble countertops.  

The hallway half-bathroom was the perfect spot to assess the damage. 

She winced at her reflection. It was worse than she’d expected. Her hair looked like the tomato had sneezed on it, snotty strings of tomato gloop crisscrossing her cornrows speckled with gray seeds. 

“Gross.” She murmured and grabbed a washcloth out of the cabinet. She dampened it with warm water and grabbed some soap from the dispenser, and she went to work trying to clean the tomato out of her hair. 

Mandie usually always went out of her way to make fun of Reena’s hair.  

Mandie thought she was all high and mighty because her family had enough money to send her to a fancy private school. She already had modeling agencies coming after her. 

Reena stopped rubbing the soap into her scalp and stared at her face in the mirror. It wasn’t a bad face. She didn’t like her nose particularly. And she thought her eyes were too close together.  

But Mandie had an unusual beauty about her. Maybe her features were symmetrical. Maybe it was all the Lebanese DNA that gave her such style and grace and charisma, but she was meaner than a hornet.  

Reena went back to squeezing the soap into and out of her braids. The water in the sink turned pinkish-red. She was almost finished before she realized she should have been doing this in the kitchen with a garbage disposal. 

Hopefully it wouldn’t clog the bathroom sink. 

She stood and pressed a fresh towel into her braids.  

Did she need to tell her parents? Did she need to tell them how Mandie had sneaked up on her? Overpowered her with a mushy fruit? 

No, she didn’t need to tell them everything.  

Just like she didn’t need to tell them about the other world. If they knew about the other world, they might pull her out of the Peregrine Agency. If they knew Peregrine was okay with experiments like that, her parents might think it was too dangerous.  

And they would probably be right. 

But she was never going to be a warrior. She was never going to be a Marine. If she wanted to make something of their family’s legacy, Peregrine was the only way she could do it. 

“I just have to get stronger,” she whispered to her reflection. 

The lights in the house flickered, blinking on and off again as though someone were controlling the switches.  

A soft whine echoed through the house. A quiet cry, like a child.  

Reena poked her head out of the bathroom and looked up and down the hallway. What was that? It wasn’t like any sound she’d ever heard before.  

She stood in the kitchen and listened. It wasn’t in the kitchen. It wasn’t in the dining room. It wasn’t in the living room.  

She paused and looked over her shoulder to the closed door on the other side of the bathroom.  

“Dad’s office.” 

The cry came again, louder this time. But it wasn’t echoing in the house like she’d thought it was. Or was it? She couldn’t tell. The sound was strange, tinny, contained as though it were trapped in some kind of prison. 

Help. 

Her stomach flipped. 

There were no words. Just a sense of urgency. A sense of need. Someone was trapped in her father’s office, and they needed help.  

Reena paused at the door, staring at the doorknob.  

Going into Jasper Ellis’s office wasn’t allowed when he was at home, let alone when he wasn’t at home. He dealt with top secret government matters, affairs of state, FBI business. Reena suspected he did far more than what she realized even.  

Help.  

But whoever was trapped in his office needed her. Why was her father locking people up in his office anyway?  

She wrapped her fingers around the doorknob. 

What if it’s a family issue? Her stomach tightened.  

They didn’t often talk about her father’s family. It was a difficult topic for many reasons, not the least of which was his alien heritage. Alien seemed like such a strange word to apply to her father, but what else did you call someone who wasn’t born on Earth? 

Help! 

It didn’t matter.  

Whatever had convinced her father to lock someone up in his office, it didn’t matter. They needed help, and Reena was the only one home.  

She turned the knob and opened the door.  

Her father’s office looked like it always did. Immaculate. Organized. Marine Corps flags and posters and photographs on the walls. Sports memorabilia for the Kansas City Chiefs. Old photos with his best friend, Ezekiel Blackfox, from when they’d been stationed in Japan toward the end of the Vietnam War. 

But empty otherwise. 

“So where is the voice coming from?” 

Help. 

Reena turned and stared at her father’s combination lock safe. It was coming from there. Inside his safe? How was that possible? 

Oh, I’m going to be in so much trouble. 

She pulled out the datapad from her jeans pocket and connected to the software inside the safe. What she was doing would get her grounded for life. But then maybe her dad shouldn’t be locking sentient beings up in his safe either. Could someone ground him too? 

Her dad had purchased the safe some time ago because she’d said it was the most secure safe that he could possibly get. And it was true. But there was no safe in the world that Jim Taylor couldn’t crack, and Jim Taylor had taught Reena everything he knew.  

Or just about. 

The safe lock popped open. Reena took hold of the handle and flung the safe door open, light from the windows cascading into the darkness inside it.