Jake opened the front door, talking to someone over his shoulder. "I need to get my wallet. Wait out here." He came inside but froze when he saw me. "Oh. Hey, Tom."

"Hey." I was heading to the front door, holding a basketball. Tem and I were about to shoot some hoops, taking turns with my body, keeping score on how well we each did.

[It's not a competition. It's just exercise,] Tem told me.

[No, it's a competition,] I told him.

[I'll be using your body. Your muscle memory. It'll make no difference.]

[Yeah, tell yourself that after I crush you.]

I was about to pass Jake, but he blocked the doorway. "Where're you going?"

[Tell him you're planting a garden,] Tem thought.

I smirked and held the ball in front of Jake's face. "I'm gonna plant a garden. Can't you tell?" I brushed past him and went outside.

Marco and some other kid were standing on the driveway. Right away, I noticed that Marco had gotten a haircut since our talk in the car. His once neck-length hair was now chopped even shorter than Jake's.

I couldn't keep the smug grin off my face. "Nice hairc-"

"Before you start," he pointed at me. "I got it cut like this because my stylist recommended it. It had nothing to do with what you said the other day."

[Not even I believe that, Marco,] Tem thought.

I thought about teasing him. Then I thought, nah. Keeping the joke going for this long would just be mean. Let the poor guy come out when he's ready.

Instead, I turned my attention to the kid standing next to Marco. The kid looked about Jake's age. Besides that . . . Frankly, I didn't know what I was looking at. They were either a really masculine girl or a very feminine boy. The skin was light brown. But again, I couldn't tell if they were a person of color or a white kid with a really deep suntan.

"I haven't seen you around before," I said.

"He's a new friend from out of town. We're going to the mall together," Marco explained.

A "he" then. He didn't say anything. He kept alternating between staring at me and turning his head around to see what was behind him.

"I'm Tom. Jake's brother. You got a name?"

"Yes I do. My name is Phillip." He repeated the name with stronger articulation, as if he was worried he pronounced it wrong the first time. "Phil-lip." And then he kept going. "Ip. PHIL-ip. Phi-LIP. Ph-Ph-Ph-Ph-" Marco quickly jabbed an elbow into the kid's side. "I am Jake's cou-" Another elbow jab. "-I am Jake's friend from Canada. Fffffriend. Ca-na-da. CAN-ada. Ca-NA-" Another jab. "I am Canadese."

I stared. Slowly, I shifted my gaze to Marco.

"He has a form of Tourette's syndrome," Marco said.

"Ah," I said.

Jake came back outside. "Okay, let's go," he said quickly. "I'll be back later, Tom."

"Later," I said. The three boys turned to leave and Phillip nearly tripped over his own feet. Jake and Marco grabbed him and practically dragged him upright.

I watched them rush off. "Uh, nice meeting you, Phillip," I called after them.

"Nice meeting you!" he practically shouted over his shoulder. "Nisssssss-" Jake and Marco shushed him.

I turned towards the hoop above the garage door and started dribbling the ball.

[Is it my imagination, or does your brother have a habit of collecting weird friends?] Tem asked.

[I really shouldn't judge. After all, my best friend's an alien.]

Tem took the first shot. The ball bounced off the rim.

.

The following Saturday, something strange happened.

The computer at the Yeerk pool picked up a distress signal. It came from a gravel quarry way out in the middle of nowhere. There were no ships in the quarry, just the distress beacon.

The frequency was distinctly Yeerk, but it was a very old frequency. Like, it was already old back when the Yeerks were an evil empire. It was the equivalent of picking up a telephone and hearing Morse code. The signal came from a one-way distress beacon, not a communicator, so we couldn't really talk back to them. The proper response to such a signal was to send help in person.

There were only three groups of aliens known to live on Earth at the moment. There was us. There was the Hork-Bajir colony who lived in the mountain valley way out in the other direction. And there were the Andalite bandits.

"Sooooo . . . This is a trap, right?" I said.

"It's definitely a trap," Eva, Chapman, and Tidwell all said in perfect unity.

"Doi," Alison added.

"Are these Andalites idiots or do they just think we are?" I asked angrily. I really didn't like being thought of as an idiot. "Even if it's a Yeerk signal, it's obviously not Yeerks sending it. Unless they got to Earth without a ship. Or we're supposed to think it's one of us, like we don't keep track of our own numbers."

"With a signal like this, in an isolated place like that, they must be expecting us to send a ship to investigate," Tidwell reasoned. "Which means they don't realize our refugee ship can't fly anymore."

"It's just like I said," Alison said. "Since their own ship blew up, they want to hijack ours to get home."

"I'm pretty sure I'm the one who said that," I reminded her.

Alison waved it off. "Oh, who keeps track of these things?" I narrowed my eyes at her, but only briefly.

"It's a stupidly simple trap," Chapman said. "But . . . It might be difficult to avoid."

We all looked at him. Alison said, "How do you figure? All we have to do is not go."

"If we go to the quarry, we'll be putting ourselves in danger," Chapman explained. "But if we don't go, we'll miss our best chance of finding the Andalites."

"That's true," I said. "This is the best lead we've had since they came to Earth. And since their trap didn't fool us, we can turn it around and trap them instead."

"Let's not rush into anything," Eva said. "Knowing it's a trap doesn't magically make it safe. Do you really want to just waltz into it?"

"Well we're not gonna stop the Andalites just by staring at them through a scanner," I shot back.

Tem and I were in sync. It's not that we didn't know it was dangerous. Of course we were nervous. But we were also excited to get any chance to stop the Andalites.

"We should also consider the one-in-a-million possibility that this distress call actually is a distress call," Tidwell said dryly.

"Even more reason to go!" I said. "Let's go and be prepared for anything. We should bring all our best weapons. The Dracon rifles, the compact Dracon beams, magnetic cuffs, force-field projector, stasis manipulators, tranquilizers, bio-trackers-"

"Maybe some semi-automatics and a bomb while we're at it," Eva said sarcastically.

"Do we have a bomb?" I asked. I wasn't sarcastic.

Chapman spoke up. "We shouldn't all go. If things turn badly, somebody needs to guard the pool. Or act as a rescue party. I recommend a team of two or three go investigate the quarry, keeping an open communication channel with the others. Be prepared for a fight, but don't start one. The main objective should be to learn about the enemy. With a bit of luck, maybe even follow them to their base. Now, since we don't have a flying ship, getting there will take some time. The team should get ready to leave as soon as possible. Any volunteers?"

"I'm in," I said immediately.

Eva said, "Tom, this could be an especially dang-" But I cut off her usual "You're only a child and as adults we really shouldn't be sending you into danger because oh-my-goodness imagine if your parents found out" speech.

"Eva, you would have to tie me up to make me sit this one out."

.

In the end, Eva and I were the ones to go. There was no road leading to the quarry. We drove on a motorbike through the woods. Well, I called it a motorbike, but it wasn't cool-looking like one at all. It was originally a mag-lev cart for hauling equipment. But it was faster than walking.

We scanned the gravel quarry as closely as possible, but it wasn't much help. The sensors at the pool were designed for finding spaceships out in orbit. They weren't sensitive enough to pin down specific life forms, at least not that far away. We couldn't see how many were there or what morph they were in. All we had to go on was the location of the distress beacon.

As I drove, Eva sat behind me and kept in contact with the pool. The others called the freighter at the Hork-Bajir colony. The call rang for a while, but Toby answered eventually. She confirmed what we already figured; all the Hork-Bajir were accounted for in her valley and none of them were sending a distress signal. It had to be the Andalite bandits.

The quarry really was in the middle of nowhere. If we had a ship, it would've taken just five minutes to fly there. I figured sneaking up on land might give us the element of surprise. But with no ship and no road, getting there took us THE ENTIRE DAY.

Well, not literally, but it sure felt like that.

I started to worry they would leave before we could get there. Eva stared at her handheld scanner. The distress signal was coming in loud and clear. But as I feared, it stopped when we were only halfway there.

"They turned the beacon off," she said over the buzz of the engine.

"Dapsen!" I drove between the trees as fast as I could.

It took another half-hour to finally arrive. We parked the vehicle in the sparse trees and walked to the gravel. The quarry itself was just a giant hole in the ground with rocks and a bit of water at the bottom. Very empty. Very few places to hide.

"Marco would probably find this place funny," Eva muttered.

"What?"

"Our lives have become like a sci-fi show," she explained. "And now we're in what looks like the set of every alien planet on every sci-fi show there is."

"Yeah. Hilarious."

Cautiously, we walked down to the center. Eva paid close attention to her scanner. While I scanned the area with my eyes and my Dracon beam held ready.

Nothing. There weren't even little birds or lizards they could've been morphed as. The place was deserted, and they took the distress beacon with them.

Eva spoke into her communicator. "We're here, but . . . They're not. We're too late."

Chapman replied on the other end. "Since we took too long to send a ship, they figured we weren't coming. They gave up and left."

[Figures,] Tem thought. [They blew up their own ship because fixing it would be too much trouble. Andalites have no patience.]

[Neither do I. Honestly, I kind of get it.]

I kinda hoped this quarry was their headquarters and it wouldn't matter when we got there. But even Andalites weren't stupid enough to set a trap in a place that could be traced back to them. The scanner couldn't find any sort of trail we could follow either. But if they could morph birds, there wouldn't be.

There was nothing more we could do there. We got ready to head back.

There was a chance they really were there in the form of tiny bugs. They could even be hitching a ride on our bodies. But since Andalites could only stay in morph for a maximum of two hours, there was virtually no chance they'd still be there after the long drive. Just in case, Eva and I swept the mini-scanner all over our bodies and found nothing. And just because Tem and I felt like it, the first thing I did after getting home was take a shower. I couldn't find so much as a flea hiding on me - and I looked.

I wished we found them at the quarry. If they weren't in one place, they were in any place.

We were all frustrated. Sure, we didn't walk into a trap after all. But we had nothing else to show for the day. For the second time, the Andalite bandits ran away before we even saw them. We were zero for two.

.

It got worse.

We didn't know it at the time, but someone else had noticed the Andalite bandits' distress signal.