Gabby couldn’t get off the sunroom floor. She felt like every inch of energy had drained out of her.

“I can’t believe I never even thought of the Find My iPhone app,” she moaned to Zee. “How did I not think Madison would do that?”

“Because it’s crazy, that’s why!” Zee said. “And the babies had grabbed her phone before. You had every reason to think it was just an accident.”

“But Madison was crazy about the mirror. I saw it. I knew how badly she wanted it. I just never imagined…” Gabby sighed and shook her head. “Now the whole planet’s in danger because of me.”

“Not true,” Zee said. “Edwina trusts Harold, remember? That means he’s good. He’ll get the mirror back.”

Just then the baby monitor crackled to life. “Hey, guys!” Satchel called through it. “Did everybody leave? ’Cause the babies are ready to play.”

Zee grinned. “You hear that? Thirteen babies who want to play with you. Don’t even try to tell me that doesn’t make you happy.”

Gabby gave Zee a half smile. “I may as well enjoy it. Even if the planet does survive, it’ll probably be my last alien babysitting job. My last ever babysitting job, once Madison posts her footage of me pushing two babies in one stroller—never mind whatever else she caught on video here.”

“That’s the spirit,” Zee said. “Kind of.”

Gabby gazed out the sunroom windows. The Kincaids had a beautiful fenced-in backyard, with lots of trees and a big lawn dotted with piles of late-autumn leaves. The sun was on its way down, but there was still another hour or so of late-afternoon light. It was Gabby’s favorite time of day, and her spirit lifted as she imagined sharing it with the babies.

“Let’s get them bundled up,” Gabby told Zee. “We’re going outside.”

With Gabby, Satchel, and Zee working together, it didn’t take long to get the babies into their adorable little puffy coats and hats. Then the three put on their own jackets, Gabby grabbed her knapsack, and they toted the babies outside to let them loose on the grass.

One by one, the babies fell to their hands and knees and crawled around, giggling at the texture against their palms. Several of the babies plucked up dried leaves and held them up so close to their faces they went slightly cross-eyed marveling at them. Gabby knew the babies had all come from One, but she wondered if the new ones had any memory of grass and leaves, or if they were like one-year-old newborns, experiencing this for the first time.

Either way, watching their delight made everything else better.

“How about we work up an appetite for dinner?” Gabby called. “Who wants to play Super-Awesome Baby Dance Party?”

“I love Super-Awesome Baby Dance Party!” Satchel enthused.

“I’ll watch,” Zee said.

“You will so not watch,” Gabby said. She dug into her purple knapsack and pulled out dance props for each of the babies: colorful scarves to shake, small egg-shaped maracas, chunky harmonicas and whistles. Then she yanked out a small Bluetooth speaker and blared They Might Be Giants’ Here Come the ABCs from her phone. She, Satchel, the babies, and even Zee flailed around like crazy as the music rocked out.

They had just started a second song when a loud male voice came from the side of the yard.

“Hello?” he barked. “Hello?”

Gabby heard the creak of the side gate, and alarms roared in her head. “Watch the babies,” she told Satchel and Zee, then ran to check it out.

A short, round man had pushed his way through the unlocked gate and was lumbering down the side yard. “Hey!” Gabby called in her most intimidating voice. “This is private property. Leave or I’ll call 9-1-1.”

The man put up his hands. “Not here to cause any trouble, Gabby,” he said. “Wouldn’t do that to ya.”

Gabby glared at him. “How do you know my name?”

“Check out the hat,” he said. The man was dressed in khaki pants, scuffed sneakers, and a thick black sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo for some sports team. Even though it was dusk, his eyes hid behind large ref lective sunglasses. He had a thick black mustache just over his upper lip, and when he took off his baseball cap Gabby could see his mess of black hair was equally thick. He tossed the cap to Gabby and she looked at the insignia on the front.

A ssociation

L inking

I ntergalactics &

E arthlings as

N eighbors

The hair on the back of Gabby’s neck prickled. “What is this?”

The man sighed. “Yeah, Edwina said you’re a responsible type and ya might need even more, so here’s what I got. Your name’s Gabby Duran, your sister’s Carmen, your mom’s Alice, and right now around your neck you got a pair a’ dog tags that used to be your dad’s, which ended up in your pocket after ya babysat a troll named Trymmy. Can I put my hands down now?”

“Yeah, okay,” Gabby said warily. “But stay right there.”

“Great. Pleased to meet’cha.” The man stuck out a meaty hand. “Eddie. Funny, right? Eddie and Edwina. Imagine if we ever got hitched.”

“Hitched?” Gabby echoed as she shook his hand. “You’re her boyfriend?”

Eddie chuckled. “I wish. Maybe one day, if I get lucky, but right now we’re just friends. She gave me that hat for my birthday, though. Like it?”

“It’s a logo baseball cap for a supersecret multigovernment organization.”

“Yeah!” Eddie enthused. “Ain’t it great?

“But…A.L.I.E.N.’s a secret,” Gabby persisted. “Why would they even make a logo hat?”

“Hey, beats me, I don’t own the place. But it sure is sharp, right?” He took the hat back from Gabby and smashed it back onto his head. “So, uh, look. We should probably stop all the chitchat stuff. I’m here to fetch the shiny thing, and Edwina’d want me to fetch it right away, so, um…”

Eddie stuck out his cupped fleshy hands, but Gabby just stared at them, dread tingling through her body.

“You mean the mirror?” Gabby asked.

“Well, yeah, but I was trying to be all subtlelike.”

Gabby shook her head. “I don’t have the mirror. Harold came here for it, but it had already been stolen, so I told him where to find it.”

“Harold?”

“Harold,” Gabby repeated hopefully. “The first person Edwina sent.”

Eddie grimaced. He pursed his lips beneath his mustache and bounced nervously on the balls of his feet. “Uh-oh. This ain’t good. There was no first person. Edwina didn’t send no one but me.”

“That’s impossible,” Gabby said. “Harold knew things about me. About my work with A.L.I.E.N.”

“Yeah, those Hautties are dummies, but they sure know their way around social networks. They find stuff out when they need to.”

“But he wasn’t a Hauttie!” Gabby protested. “I saw him! He wasn’t hot ! Not even a little bit!”

“Uh-huh.” Eddie ran his thick hand over his cheeks and chin. “And there’s no way the ugly stuff could have been makeup?”

Gabby felt sick. She hadn’t even thought of that. After all the horror movies she’d watched, after all the time she’d spent on sets babysitting actors’ kids, she’d never once imagined Harold’s unattractiveness could be anything but real. And yet the bad skin, the stooped shoulders, the potbelly…it could easily have been a combination of makeup, costume, and acting. And yes, Harold had known Gabby’s A.L.I.E.N. Associate number, but he hadn’t given her anywhere near as much information as Eddie had.

The world started spinning. Gabby leaned against the side of the house. “So you’re saying I gave the location of a doomsday laser lens to a Hauttie who wants to destroy humanity?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Eddie agreed. “Tough one. Ah, well. I better get going and make some plans.”

“Wait—what?!” Gabby lunged forward and grabbed his arm. “You can’t just go. You’re an A.L.I.E.N. agent! You have to help me fix this!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m no A.L.I.E.N. agent.” Eddie snorted as if the idea were ridiculous. “I’m just a friend Edwina trusts. She’s usin’ me ’cause the A.L.I.E.N. folks think she’s bonkers for even worryin’ about the Hautties.”

“You’re not A.L.I.E.N.?” Gabby echoed uncomprehendingly. “But you knew about Trymmy, and the dog tags, and the Hautties.”

“’Cause Edwina told me!” Eddie said. “She gave me this whole info dump a couple hours ago, and I got here as fast as I could.”

Gabby’s mind whirled. Nothing was adding up.

“No,” she said. “If she could get information to people, she would have told us more about you, so we knew who to look for. She would have—”

“She woulda done a lot,” Eddie agreed, “but communication’s no good out where she is. Me, though? This whole body’s just one giant antenna. I can pick up stuff from anywhere.”

Gabby furrowed her brow. “Your body is an antenna?”

“Better believe it! Hey—think fast!”

Suddenly, his entire body froze, and his mustache leaped off his face toward Gabby. Without thinking, Gabby reached out to catch it. The mustache landed on her cupped palms, stood on one end, and waved around expressively as a higher pitched version of Eddie’s “voice” echoed in Gabby’s brain. “This is my real body!” it declared. “And if the planet’s gonna be wiped out soon, I got to get me and my antenna system to a galaxy far, far away!” The mustache doubled over as its voice tittered in Gabby’s head. “I laugh every time I say that. Okay, see ya!”

The mustache bounded off Gabby’s palms and back onto Eddie’s face. The minute it landed, Eddie jolted back to life. He smiled at Gabby.

“Nice meetin’ ya,” he said. “I’d say I hope to see ya again, but…well, you know.”

And with that, he gave Gabby a collegial punch on the arm and walked out through the gate.

Gabby stared after him for a moment in complete disbelief, but then she heard the babies, still laughing, maraca-shaking, and whistling as they kept playing Freeze Dance with Satchel and Zee.

She couldn’t fall apart right now. Too many people were counting on her.

She raced back to her friends and the babies and turned off the music. She needed her phone, and she needed to hear.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Satchel balked. “We were still playing!”

“And we’re going to keep playing,” Gabby said to the babies. “But now we’re going to play a quiet game. We’re playing Copycat, so everyone do exactly what Satchel does, okay? Can you do that, Satchel? Quiet Copycat? Please?”

Satchel didn’t need to ask what was going on. He saw in Gabby’s eyes that this wasn’t just a request. He nodded solemnly. “Done.” Then he gathered the babies and spoke in an exaggerated whisper. “Everyone do what I do, okay?”

While he patted his head and the babies imitated him, Gabby frantically scrolled through her phone.

“What’s up?” Zee asked as she sidled next to Gabby.

“Harold was a Hauttie in disguise,” Gabby answered without looking up from her screen. “I’m looking through my orchestra contacts. I have to call Madison and hope he hasn’t found her yet.”

“And if he has?” Zee asked.

“The mirror’s the lens for a planet-destroying weapon,” Gabby said. “If he has it, we’re all doomed.”

Gabby pressed CALL. She heard the phone ring in her ear…

…and a half second later she heard it again in the yard.

“Did you hear that?” Gabby asked Zee.

Zee nodded.

The phone rang again in Gabby’s ear, and another half second later in the yard.

Zee looked skeptically at Gabby. “You don’t think…”

“She was so desperate to see herself she didn’t even make it out of the yard?” Gabby finished hopefully.

The two girls stared at each other, daring to take in the possibility. Then they ran across the yard to the source of the sound. It came from a wide copse of bamboo plants along the side yard, between the window through which Madison stole the mirror and the side gate—right along her escape path, and right where she might have stopped and hid if she couldn’t bear to have her prize and not use it for one second longer.

The phone rang one last time, and Gabby and Zee pushed through the bamboo.

Madison Murray was there, still in her Santa dress. She sat on a large rock. Her phone was set to flashlight mode, balanced in the thick joint of two bamboo plants. The added light brightened the dusk, so Madison could better see her ref lection in the mirror she clutched in two hands.

She was so still, Gabby wasn’t sure she was breathing.

“Madison?”

No response.

“You think she’s been sitting there the whole time?” Zee asked.

“Maybe,” Gabby replied. “Madison.”

Still no response.

“Has she even moved?” Zee asked. “A bathroom break, maybe?”

Gabby shrugged. She tried again. “MADISON!”

No response at all. Not even a twitch.

“So not dealing with this,” Zee said. She grabbed the mirror out of Madison’s hands and ran.

Madison snapped awake as if from a trance. When she saw Zee running with the mirror, she turned rabid. She flared her nostrils, bared her teeth, and let out a guttural roar as she jumped off the rock and ran…

…for about four steps. Then her legs gave out from under her.

“Ow!” Madison wailed. She rolled back and forth on the lawn, her hands around her right calf. “Leg cramp!”

“Well, yeah,” Gabby said. “You’ve been sitting in the same position for hours.”

“I need that mirror, Gabby!” Madison demanded. “And tell those little mutant babies to stop staring at me!”

The babies were still with Satchel, but now they looked over at Madison curiously. They didn’t seem terribly upset by the strange person screaming in their backyard, but Gabby was furious.

“They’re not mutants, Madison,” she hissed.

“Sure they are,” Madison said. “I saw what happened in that house, and I swear I will tell the world if you don’t give me back that mirror.”

“I’m afraid she can’t do that.”

The voice was a mellif luous baritone, and it belonged to a gorgeous guy in his twenties, who sauntered through the gate like a king. Without his balding-cap, nose putty, and bad-skin makeup, his hair was thick and his skin was flawless. He stood broad-shouldered and tall. If it wasn’t for the green coveralls—completely oversized now that he’d taken out the potbelly stuffing—Gabby might not have recognized him.

“Hi,” he said. He locked eyes with Madison and gave her a smile so meltworthy that Gabby felt her own stomach flutter just from being near it. “I’m Harry.”

And maybe he was. But Gabby knew him by the name he used when he was trying to hide his hotness.

She knew him as Harold.