In fact, elephant pendants like this were commonly worn by adults who leave the planet, emblems of home-world solidarity. My mother and father had both received them when they had graduated from the Academy and accepted jobs in the Protectorship. As far as I knew, they’d never taken them off.

So what on earth-or any other planet, for that matter-were a bunch of Number 5’s henchbeasts doing walking around with an Alpar Nokian elephant necklace?

It had to be one of my first memories, that little silver elephant hanging from my mother’s neck. I’d play with it endlessly, watching it twirl and catch the light whenever she held me in her arms… though I hadn’t thought about it in years.

I wiped away some moisture from my eye before it technically became a tear. One more mystery for me to solve, I thought with a sigh, putting the pendant in my pocket.

Just then I had this really weird sensation that I was being watched, and I spun around. But there was nothing-just cricket-infested woods.

“Joe,” I yelled into the van, “are you picking up any alien life-forms on the scanners?”

“Nothing but regular wildlife. Those cat eaters we scared off are miles away by now.”

Great, I thought. Now Number 5’s made me paranoid, on top of everything else.

Chapter 20

AFTER A MILE or so, the county road crossed over the freeway, and we pulled into a small Exxon minimart at the end of the off-ramp to regroup about where the night’s mission was headed. We got some waters and sodas, and Joe bought a couple dozen bags of chips, a fistful of jerky sticks, and at least a dozen Hostess bakery products.

That was normal, but here’s the weird part: Joe actually stopped eating in the back of the van before he’d finished inhaling his third bag of nacho cheese chips. Even weirder, he paused to place a crumb inside what looked like a miniature microwave oven.