BEFORE getting out my homework, I sent a quick message to Kyna. Just like last time, she called back almost immediately.
“Excellency, I agree that a meeting such as you suggest is in order. Earlier today I spoke with Lili O’Gara, who also has a few concerns. The Council feels she and her husband may be useful as liaisons going forward, so I will ask them to attend, as well.”
“It does make sense to have people already familiar with Jewel from the Echtran side do whatever they can to help the newcomers adjust. Maybe the Stuarts should come, too?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “Van Stuart is already setting up NuAgra’s online systems and Ariel Stuart has offered to mentor the new Healer attached to NuAgra as well. If you’d like, I can suggest all Echtrans currently residing in Jewel attend.”
“That would be awesome. How soon can we make this happen? And where?”
“The most obvious location is the NuAgra facility itself, Excellency,” Kyna replied. “I’ll schedule the meeting for tomorrow night, if you can arrange to be there. You don’t yet have a driver’s license, as I recall?”
“No, I got back to Jewel too late to get into Driver’s Ed this semester so I have to wait till spring. The O’Garas can probably drive me, though.”
“Very well. I’ll message you as soon as a time is set.”
Relieved, I flicked off my omni and got started on my homework, confident now that we’d be able to head off any potential problems before they had a chance to spiral out of control.
When Uncle Louie got home a couple of hours later, I was doubly glad I’d requested that meeting.
“Four more sales today,” he crowed the moment he walked in the kitchen door. “That’s nine so far this week and it’s only Wednesday!”
He set the two packages he was carrying on the kitchen table and then, amazingly, went over to Aunt Theresa and kissed her on the cheek—something I couldn’t remember ever witnessing before.
“Louie!” she admonished him, looking embarrassed—kind of hilarious considering they’d been married for something like thirty years. “That’s…very good news, dear,” she added when he backed off, still grinning.
“I still can’t get over how friendly all these new folks are. A couple of Monday’s buyers stopped back in and invited us all to dinner next week—and then the couple I was drawing up papers for did the same thing!”
I could feel Aunt Theresa’s surge of alarm. “You didn’t accept, did you?”
He stared at her. “Of course I did! I want them to send more customers my way, don’t I? The second couple mentioned having two daughters who’ll be attending Jewel High with Marsha.”
Though my aunt looked slightly reassured, I had no illusions about why these new Echtrans were buttering up my uncle.
“I figure we can invite them to our house sometime, too,” he continued. “You know, show some Hoosier hospitality. Oh, and one of yesterday’s buyers stopped by to drop off a big box of fudge and another couple brought me this, for my family, they said.”
Picking up the smaller of the two packages he’d brought in, he handed it to Aunt Theresa. She opened it cautiously, as though she expected it to explode.
“I tried to explain to them that here in Indiana it’s the locals who give housewarming gifts to new neighbors, not the other way around, but they insisted.”
“Oh, my,” Aunt Theresa exclaimed, lifting a beautiful crystal statuette from the box. “This is lovely.” But the look she sent me was definitely worried.
I was even more concerned than Aunt Theresa, but tried not to show it. I’d seen that statuette at Glitterby’s last week and happened to know it cost a couple hundred dollars. Definitely not okay. Something else to address at tomorrow night’s meeting, to nip this sort of thing in the bud.
Meanwhile, Uncle Louie absolutely needed to be clued in so he wouldn’t accept any more gifts—bribes?—or invitations.
I said as much to Aunt Theresa when he went upstairs to change out of his work clothes while we got dinner on the table. “We need to tell him,” I whispered. “Tonight. Before this kind of thing gets out of hand.”
Her brows drew together doubtfully. “Do you really think that’s wise? He may be my husband, but I’m by no means blind to his weaknesses. In fact, I know them all too well. He—”
Uncle Louie bounced back into the kitchen then, so she broke off.
“I’ve got a funny story to tell you over dinner.” He sat down, grinning at us across his plate of spaghetti. “You know my buddy Greg, our mechanic at the lot? He says when he was leaving Saturday afternoon those black SUVs from the FBI were behind him for a ways, I guess after they left here. And get this—he swears when he looked in his rear view mirror, he recognized the President—of the United States!—leaning forward from the back seat. Isn’t that a hoot?”
Shaking his head, he picked up his fork. “Like the President could visit little Jewel, Indiana without it being all over the news? He felt pretty foolish when I told him why those cars were really here. Gave me a good laugh, especially since Greg always accuses me of exaggerating. I’m gonna be able to hold this one over his head for a long time.”
Still chuckling, he took a big bite of spaghetti, so didn’t notice the panicked look Aunt Theresa shot me across the table. For a moment I wondered if it might be possible to keep Uncle Louie in the dark indefinitely, he was so incredibly clueless. But it was too risky.
Before he could launch into another story, I cleared my throat. “Um, Uncle Louie, there’s something you ought to know.”
“Uh-oh. You’re not gonna tell me you really are in trouble with the FBI, are you?” he joked.
“Marsha,” Aunt Theresa said urgently. “Are you sure—?”
“Whoa.” Uncle Louie looked from her to me and back, his smile fading. “What did you do?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I’m not in any trouble. But you could stir some up by accident if I don’t tell you what’s really going on.”
“Huh?”
Aunt Theresa surprised me by speaking up first. “Louie, those black cars that were here on Saturday weren’t from the FBI. Your friend Greg was right, I’m afraid. The President of the United States was here—in our house. The other cars were his Secret Service detail.”
“Huh?” Uncle Louie repeated, looking even more confused.
I took over. “He came to thank me for, um, something I did. His visit is why Aunt Theresa had to finally be told the truth about me. And now, with so many of these newcomers trying to get chummy, you need to know, too.”
Uncle Louie kept looking back and forth between us. “The President? Really? Here? Uh…what truth?”
I took a deep breath before launching into what I hoped would be a coherent explanation. “About a year ago, I learned about a secret human colony under the surface of the planet Mars. I also learned that’s where my parents—my birth parents—came from. In fact, I was born there myself but brought to Earth as a baby before my parents were killed.”
I went on to tell him about the monarchy there, how I was heir to the Martian throne, then all the events of the last year, including how I’d gone to Mars and why more and more Martians would be coming to Earth—and Jewel. Uncle Louie didn’t say a word the whole time I was talking but his eyes kept getting bigger and bigger.
“Anyway,” I concluded, “this new company, NuAgra, is mostly a cover so a bunch of new Echtrans—that’s what expatriate Martians are called—can move to Jewel without people getting too suspicious.”
For nearly a full minute he just sat there, blinking, his eyes again darting back and forth between me and Aunt Theresa, who was watching him with a worried frown. Then, suddenly, he laughed.
“Wow, that was a good one, Marsha! You really had me going for a while there. I remember you always did have a good imagination. You should write novels or something. I bet if you sent that story to a magazine, they’d pay you for it.”
Aunt Theresa let out a huff. “I told Marsha you wouldn’t believe us, but it’s true, Louie. All of it.”
His grin faded and he looked at her almost pityingly. “Oh, come on, Theresa, you don’t mean she actually managed to convince you of all that stuff? I thought you had more sense than that. Shoot, more sense than me, even.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said at the start? The President of the United States came here, to our house. I met him myself, at our own front door. After he left, Lili O’Gara and a woman who’d come here with him sat me down in our living room and told me everything that Marsha just told you. I didn’t want to believe it either, but I had no choice.”
“But…but…how—?”
“I know it’s a lot, Uncle Louie,” I said gently. “It took Aunt Theresa a few days before it really sank in. If it’ll help, I can prove it.”
He looked at me, slightly dazed. “Prove it? How?”
“Just a sec.”
I ran upstairs and grabbed my omni off my nightstand, then hurried back down to the kitchen.
“This is probably the easiest way. They call this an omni.” I held up the little device, no bigger than a flash drive or a pack of gum. “It’s Martian technology, kind of like a smartphone on steroids. Watch.” I touched the tiny button on the end.
When the holographic control panel appeared, Uncle Louie’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. Aunt Theresa also gasped, since she hadn’t seen it before.
“How—? What—?” Uncle Louie stammered.
“It does all kinds of stuff—way more than I’ve had time to learn, yet. But here.”
I pulled up the communication screen and replayed Kyna’s message from Saturday. Her face appeared in midair and my aunt and uncle both started back.
“Excellency, I must warn you that you will shortly have an extremely important visitor—the President of the United States. He should arrive at your home at approximately five o’clock this evening. You may wish to prepare your relatives in some way beforehand.” Kyna’s face disappeared and the little screen went dark.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t think to check my messages until about a minute before the President got here, or I could have given Aunt Theresa some warning. Look, here’s something else it can do.”
I touched another spot on the control panel. The screen expanded to about twice the size of our TV and began playing a slideshow I’d downloaded before leaving Nuath.
“That’s Thiaraway,” I told them as the pictures flashed across the big screen. “It’s the capital city of Nuath and where I was Acclaimed Sovereign. There, see that?” I paused at the image of a beautiful pink crystalline structure. “That’s the Royal Palace. I lived there most of the summer before coming back home.”
I let it show a few more pictures of various places around Nuath, then I shut the omni off. “It can also keep me warm if it’s cold outside, act as a rain shield, translate any language into any other, all kinds of cool stuff.”
Aunt Theresa and Uncle Louie both stared at me, even though Aunt Theresa had known the truth for a few days now. “Is it…dangerous?” She pointed at the omni.
“Of course not. It’s not a weapon or anything, just really useful. I can even communicate with Rigel’s grandfather on Mars with it, though there’s nearly a half-hour lag now, since the planets are moving farther apart from each other.”
Uncle Louie sucked in a breath. “It really is true? All of it?”
I nodded—cautiously, because he still looked stunned. Then, before I could even get a read on his emotions, a big smile suddenly broke across his face.
“Cool! And you’re, like, their queen? Wow, no wonder the Stuarts and the O’Garas have always been so nice to you—and us. Oh, hey, and you dating Jewel High’s star quarterback makes a lot more sense now. See, Theresa? There was a good reason all along, while you thought—”
She cleared her throat and he broke off, looking suddenly embarrassed. “Well, anyway,” he continued after an awkward pause, “I think it’s great. And the President was really here, at our house?”
“He really was. He, um, gave me a medal. Do you want to see that, too?” I was hugely relieved Uncle Louie was taking the news so much better than Aunt Theresa had.
Until his next words.
“Sure! Say, can I maybe borrow it, show it to my buddies at work? Greg will crow when he finds out he was right all along, but Tom will—”
“No!” Aunt Theresa and I both exclaimed at the same time.
“Uncle Louie, this has to be kept really, really secret,” I insisted, using all the Royal “push” I could summon. “You can’t tell anybody. Seriously. Promise you won’t?”
His face fell slightly. “Aw, not even Tom? He thinks he’s such a big shot, just because his cousin is a councilman up in Chicago. This is so much—”
“Not anybody,” I repeated, holding his pleading gaze with my own stern one, not giving an inch. “If people in Jewel knew about this, they’d flip out! They’d treat me…all of us…like freaks. And if they got scared, they might even do something bad to me and the others. We have to keep this super, super secret. Please, Uncle Louie, you have to promise!”
Now his eyes slid away from mine. “Okay, okay, fine,” he mumbled.
I kept watching him for a long moment, thoroughly probing his emotions to tell if he meant it. He seemed to, though grudgingly. Still, I was fairly confident that once he really thought things through he’d keep that promise, no matter how much he was dying to impress his friends.
“Our spaghetti is stone cold,” my aunt suddenly said. “I’ll have to reheat everything in the microwave. Louie, any other questions you have for Marsha can wait until after she’s eaten.”
Of course, he still asked a few during dinner, despite Aunt Theresa’s frowns. Between answers—and bites of spaghetti—I reminded him several more times how important it was to keep this information to himself. Though he nodded each time, I worried he still didn’t completely get it.
“Hey, how about some of that fudge for dessert?” he suggested as Aunt Theresa stacked our empty plates.
I shook my head. “Cormac, my Bodyguard, would go ballistic if I ate something a Martian stranger gave you without letting him taste it first.”
“Huh? You mean all these new NuAgra people already know I’m your uncle? Is that why they’re buying cars from me and inviting us all to dinner and stuff?”
“Well…yeah. That’s the reason I had to tell you all this—so you’d know not to accept any more gifts or invitations from them.”
He looked disappointed. “But…how come? Where’s the harm?”
“It’s just… I don’t want them using you—or Aunt Theresa—to get to me. To try to influence me or anything.”
My aunt turned from the sink in obvious alarm, soapsuds dripping from her hands. “Didn’t you say they weren’t dangerous?”
“They’re not.” At least I had no reason—yet—to think any of them were. “But that’s not the point. You guys don’t really want to get sucked into Echtran politics, do you?”
Aunt Theresa shook her head, looking alarmed, but Uncle Louie shrugged. “Sounds pretty interesting to me,” he said. “Seems like there should be some perks for the people who took care of their leader all these years.”
“Louie!” Aunt Theresa snapped. “Think what you’re saying. You’re already selling more cars than you ever have, because of…all this. Isn’t that enough?”
He sighed. “I guess. I just thought maybe—”
“I’m sorry, but both of those gifts will have to be returned, Uncle Louie. And if you’re offered any other presents or invitations, please don’t accept. Okay?” Not that there should be any more after tomorrow night’s meeting. I planned to make sure of that.
Though obviously disappointed, he reluctantly agreed—then continued to bombard me with questions.