Within minutes, Alan and Prunella had belted themselves into the back seat of Mansch's Mercedes, and the cat man drove away into the evening. Tegan frequently looked back and smiled at the two sixth-graders from the passenger seat.
"I should call my parents and let them know where I am," Alan suggested, apparently unsure of his decision to accompany Mansch.
"Why would you want to do that?" the man asked facetiously.
"You're right," Alan realized. "That doesn't make a lot of sense."
"I'll call them for you," Tegan offered, and Mansch unfastened his cell phone and passed it to her.
At Alan's house, Mrs. Powers was phoning the neighbors, trying to find out where her son had gone. "He and Prunella left here a while ago," Rubella told her. "They said they were going to your place. I don't know where else they could be."
"Hold on," said Mrs. Powers when she heard some clicks. "I'm getting another call."
She punched the receiver button, and heard a voice that startled her. "Mom, this is Tegan."
Mrs. Powers motioned urgently to her husband, who was sitting nearby. Taking the hint, he grabbed his portable phone from an end table and dialed the police.
"She's probably getting the police on the line right now," Tegan remarked to Mansch while covering the cell phone with her palm. "But by the time they trace the call, we'll be long gone."
"Er, hello, Tegan," came her mother's voice. "Would you mind telling me where you are? I know you're not at the school."
"That's right," the bear girl replied. "And I'm not going back."
"Be reasonable," her mother pleaded.
"Alan and Prunella are with me," Tegan went on. "If you want to see them again, you'll grant me my freedom."
The connection went dead, leaving Mrs. Powers to deliberate on the shocking turn of events.
She switched back to the previous conversation with Rubella and said, "Tell your mother we need to talk."
----
A frightened, piercing scream awoke Tegan. She opened her eyes to behold Prunella sitting up next to her in the queen-sized bed, still wearing her dress from the previous day, glancing around the unfamiliar room.
"Where am I?" she cried out. It was almost eight in the morning, and the room was lighted. The last thing she remembered was bedding down after a long day of saving the universe.
"Calm down," said Tegan gently.
Prunella vaguely recognized the girl lying beside her, but didn't know at all the orange-haired rabbit girl on the other end of the bed. Then Tegan adjusted her barette, and memories of the previous day started to pour in.
It took only a minute. "I...remember," Prunella marveled. "I have some kind of memory problem, and I keep forgetting days. But you fixed it."
Tegan nodded warmly.
"I remember this room," said the rat girl, looking around at the contemporary furniture and the drawn blinds on the windows. To the rabbit girl she added, "I remember you. Your name's Claire, and you can move things with your brain."
"Very good, Prunella," said Claire with a proud grin and a slight French accent.
"I've got to tell Alan," exclaimed Prunella, leaping out of the bed.
She found the boys in another room of the house in which she had spent the night. There were three asleep together--Alan, his old classmate C.V., and a poodle boy with fluffy white hair.
"Alan!" she said loudly. "It worked! I remember everything that happened yesterday!"
"Not so loud," grumbled the poodle boy, clutching his ears.
To Alan, it seemed he was waking up to another dream, a joyous one. "That's great," he said cheerfully but quietly. "Now you can have a normal life--well, besides being a criminal."
"What's my name?" the fluffy-haired boy asked Prunella.
"Victor," the rat girl answered confidently. "You have super-sensitive senses, which is why I have to talk very softly around you."
"Someone's fixing bacon," said Victor eagerly as he crawled down from the bed.
"Even I can smell that," said Prunella mockingly.
"I didn't smell it," said Victor. "I heard it."
While C.V. was feeling for his spectacles, the drowsy-eyed Claire stepped into the room and stared at the pair of glasses on the nightstand, causing them to rise into the air and float onto the owl boy's face. "Merci beaucoups," he thanked the French girl.
The house was modest-sized but expensively furnished. Unlike the children, Raymond Mansch had already bathed and dressed himself. "Good morning, children," he greeted them from the kitchen. "Breakfast will be ready in a minute."
Alan, Prunella, Tegan, C.V., Claire, and Victor followed his voice and saw a strange man bent over the stove. "Hello," he said in a squeaky voice while flipping eggs with a spatula. "I'm one of Ray's business associates. You can call me Bernie." The tall, muscular aardvark man had a scar that ran down the right side of his face.
"Uh, it's nice to meet you," said Alan nervously. "I'm Alan Powers, and this is Prunella Prufrock."
The man didn't reach out to shake hands, but focused on his cooking. "I've met your friend Fern," he said through the corner of his mouth. "Nice girl. Very quiet."
A chill ran down Alan's back when he realized the meaning of Bernie's glib remark.
"So what kind of super powers do you have?" asked the aardvark man, turning to face Prunella.
"I, uh, don't have any," said Prunella with a shrug. "I'm only here to take advantage of Tegan's super powers."
Bernie fixed his gaze on Alan. "And what about you?"
Alan lowered his eyes, unsure if he should tell the stranger. "Don't be bashful," Mansch goaded him.
"He only has powers when he's with me," Tegan informed Bernie. "I can put memories in your head, but he can take them out."
"So you can make people forget things," said Bernie, looking thoughtfully at Alan. "What good is that?"
"I don't really know," Alan replied. "I just found out a few weeks ago that I had powers. I haven't done much with them."
"We haven't tried it yet," Tegan added, "but I believe that between the two of us, we can make people switch bodies."
Bernie pursed his lips fearfully.
As the aardvark man loaded some plates with eggs and bacon, Alan gestured for Prunella and Tegan to join him in one of the bedrooms. Once inside, he closed the door and spoke to the girls in a solemn tone.
"Bernie's one of the men who kidnapped Fern," he stated.
"Are you sure?" asked the startled Prunella.
"Yes. How else would he know her?"
"You're right, he is," Tegan admitted. "But he never wanted to hurt her, and he doesn't want to hurt us."
"There you go again," Alan chided her. "Always siding with the criminals."
"I merged with him, Alan," Tegan defended herself. "I know what kind of man he is."
"What kind of man is he?"
"He has some very good qualities," said Tegan in a belittling tone. "You can't see them, but I can."
Alan shook his head in frustration. "This was a bad idea," he told Prunella. "There must be another way."
"I'm not going back to the school," Tegan insisted.
"I have an idea," Prunella interjected. "Why don't you switch bodies?"
Alan and Tegan stared blankly at her.
"It's perfect." To Tegan she said, "You don't have to go back to the school because you're in Alan's body." To Alan she added, "You can fix my memory problem because you're in Tegan's body. And I don't have to run away from home and live with crooks."
"I don't know if we can do that," said Alan. "To other people, maybe, but to ourselves?"
"But then Alan would be locked up," said Tegan with disgust, "and I'd be a boy."
"It's just until you work out a solution with your parents," said Prunella.
"If you girls switched bodies," Alan suggested, "gender wouldn't be an issue."
Tegan literally put her foot down. "No more talk of body switching," she demanded. "I don't want to be locked up, and I don't want anyone else to be locked up in my place."
As Alan struggled for a response, the door opened and Victor stuck in his floppy-eared head. "I can hear everything you're saying," he told them. "I don't see the big deal. They set us free. So what if they're crooks?"
"Yeah," said C.V., who entered the room after him. "It's not like they can force us to use our powers for evil."
In the kitchen, Mansch and Bernie were talking between bites of bacon. "What exactly are you planning to do with those kids?" Bernie inquired. "Train them to be thieves?"
"No," Mansch answered in a lofty tone. "They're destined for much greater things. And so am I."
----
Arthur arrived at Lakewood on Monday morning of the eighth week of the school year, too distracted about the unexplained absences of his friends Buster, Alan, and Prunella to think about his new responsibilities as student body president. He and the other kids exchanged somber pleasantries as they sat down at their desks in Mrs. Krantz's classroom.
"Before I start the roll call," said the teacher, "is there anyone else who would like to disappear?"
She couldn't have picked a worse question to ask. Sue Ellen suddenly clutched her head and started to scream in pain.
She collapsed onto the floor, writhing and wailing. It was like nothing her friends had ever seen.
"Where does it hurt, dear?" asked Mrs. Krantz with motherly concern, just before the cat girl vanished in a puff of light.
The blinding agony faded rapidly, and Sue Ellen realized that she was no longer at school. As she looked around, she started to wonder if she was even on Earth.
The room had bare gray walls with regularly placed indentations that resembled round windows. It contained a variety of raised platforms with what appeared to be complex control panels. Three bizarre creatures surrounded them--uniformed beings with inhumanly long arms and opaque spheres covering their heads.
Each of the life forms raised one arm and pointed a weapon at the bewildered girl. "You are a prisoner of the Alliance," one of them stated. "Do not resist."
"P-prisoner?" Sue Ellen stammered, only to be pushed rudely forward by the other two beings.
They marched her down a long hallway with a slanted roof and yellowish walls adorned with indecipherable inscriptions. The air was cold, and smelled somewhat like stale bread. She wondered whether the sphere-heads who had accosted her were real space aliens, or mere theme-park employees.
They made a left turn into a small enclosure, then soared upward for what seemed like a mile or two. It was like taking a ride in an elevator with a missing door. Sue Ellen's captors led her past an array of cells sealed by metal latticeworks. She recognized one of the inmates through a chain-link door--it was her adopted sister and future self, April Murphy.
"April?" she called out in surprise.
"They got you, too," the older girl said flatly. She seemed emotionally drained for some reason.
As the aliens shoved Sue Ellen through an opened prison door, a woman cried from across the hallway, "Let her go! She's done nothing wrong!"
That voice...
Sue Ellen whirled.
It wasn't possible.
Behind the opposite cell door stood two people she had believed to be dead...
"Mom! Dad?"
Her delight at seeing her parents, or apparitions who resembled her parents, was abruptly interrupted when the three aliens slammed the door, trapping her in a lonely cell.
She clawed at the steel grating like an animal, desperate to break through, to be reunited. "Mom! Dad!" she shrieked. "You're not dead! You're alive!"
"Yes, honey," her mother said in an unmistakable, sweet voice. "We have a lot of explaining to do." She wore a white uniform, and her bright red hair was tied with a band in the rear.
Emotion wrenched Sue Ellen's heart, and tears poured down her cheeks. "Why weren't you shot?" she begged to know. "Why aren't you dead?"
"Our deaths were faked," her father explained calmly, "just as yours was. You see, I'm not a diplomat, or a CIA agent, or a CIA assassin. I'm a spy for the planet Yordil."
"What?" exclaimed Sue Ellen and April in unison.
"Yes, it's true," said Mrs. Armstrong. "Your parents are aliens."
"Wait," said April incredulously. "That means we're aliens, too."
"I don't feel like an alien," Sue Ellen reflected.
"All cat people on Earth are descendants of Yordilian colonists," Mr. Armstrong explained. "They're almost indistinguishable from Yordilians. The only major differences are in the brain. That's why you suddenly got a splitting headache when the Alliance police detected you and transported you here."
"They're rounding up all the Yordilians on Earth and Schmektorr," Mrs. Armstrong added.
"What's Schmektorr?" Sue Ellen asked.
"That's where we were assigned after leaving Earth," her father answered.
"Before you were born, we were sent to Earth as spies," her mother added. "When you were very small, a disaster took place on Yordil, and all the males were killed. We didn't want you to grow up on a planet with no boys and no hope of marriage, so we chose to stay on Earth. But the Yordilian authorities weren't happy about that, so they tried to find us and force us to return. That's why we moved all the time."
"That's crazy," April remarked.
"Yes, it is," her father agreed. "That's why I made up the story about being a CIA agent--because the real truth was even more unbelievable. When the Yordilian agents finally caught up with us, they agreed that you two could stay on Earth, since you had citizenship, and Yordil had more than enough girls already. I told you I was an assassin, because I hoped it would discourage you from trying to avenge our deaths. Then we were taken back to Yordil, and sent to spy on the planet Schmektorr."
"So Buster was right," Sue Ellen mused. "We've been aliens all along, and I never knew it."
"But I can't leave the planet," April protested. "I'm awaiting trial for stealing the Los Cactos crystal."
"What are we charged with, anyway?" Sue Ellen wondered.
"The Yordilians have abducted males from various planets to serve as boyfriends and husbands," her mother replied. "In return, the Alliance is abducting the Yordilians on Earth, Schmektorr, and maybe other planets as well. I imagine they'll propose an exchange of prisoners."
"But the Yordilian government will never publicly acknowledge that it has spies on other planets," Mr. Armstrong added. "Which means we may be here for a long, long time."
----
to be continued