Maybe not. Aahz had never been good at letting anyone else's mistakes go unnoticed. I probably would have been in for a lecture. I deserved one, but I had already given myself a stern talking-to.

So, I was on my own.

That was okay, I assured myself. I had to take my own baby steps, right? I vowed not to undercut my friends. I was going to stick to what I planned to do, nothing else.

A roaring noise interrupted my thoughts.

"Look out!" Bunny called. "Get it, Skeeve!"

I ducked just in time. A huge, striped insect the size of my two fists zoomed overhead. In spite of its bulk, it banked like a swallow off a wisp of air and veered around in a sharp U-turn. I threw a ball of fire at it, but the insect took the full blast of the flame and kept going. Its armored shell would have been the envy of any army in any dimension. No matter what I threw at it, it kept going. It vanished into a hairline crack in the wall. I ran after it, trying to capture it with a rope of magik. Before I could blink, it was out of reach.

"Gone," I said grimly. Bunny shook her head. I dashed out the rear door of our tent, stepping into the dimension into which our office extended, and examined the walls. No sign of the Humbee, or a single crack through which it could have escaped. I felt the side of the clapboard house, which was this dimension's face of my building. The walls were only an inch thick, too narrow to conceal the bulky bug. Where had it gone?

One more thing Catchmeier had failed to mention about the new tent was the infestation of Humbees. No one knew where the pesty insects had sprung from, but they were overrunning the Bazaar. Deveel merchants had jumped on the bandwagon already, so to speak, with Humbee repellents, traps, and insecticides. As far as I could tell from questioning friends of mine, none of them worked.