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  For my mother, who inspired me.

  For my father, who gave me poetry.

  And for the village, who raised me.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  Ruby loved bugs. She loved the cool-looking ones and the creepy ones and the pretty ones and the huge ones. The ones with six legs and eight legs and a thousand legs and no legs. She loved looking at them and talking about them and learning about them and picking them up. That last one was usually what got her in trouble.

  “Take that nasty thing outside!” Gramma would say (after she was done screaming in fright) when she found them in the Tupperware or the mason jars hidden under Ruby’s bed or in the closet. Gramma had a No Tolerance policy when it came to bugs. Any sign of an ant in the bedroom, a housefly in the kitchen, spiders in the basement, or stink bugs on the windowsills, and she would hunt them down with no mercy, her homemade bug-killing juice in an old spray bottle in one hand and sometimes a mallet in the other.

  So on that late-September afternoon when Ruby spotted the weirdest bug she’d ever seen in her front yard, she made sure no one sitting on their porch or walking down the street was looking. Then she scooped up the bug with a trowel and dropped it into one of the mason jars she kept hidden under the porch for just this sort of thing.

  Slipping into the house by the side door so she wouldn’t have to go past the TV room where Gramma was watching her stories, Ruby went upstairs (without thundering like an elephant) and dashed into her room. Here she had time to study the weird bug up close. It didn’t look like any of the species she’d ever seen before. It was a dull red color and had six legs (so not a spider), big green eyes like a fly (but no wings), and a pinchy mouth like an ant (except no segments). She figured she should look it up to make sure it wasn’t dangerous like those emerald ash borer beetles she found infesting the trees around the house. Her gramma was happy she’d been out there “messin’ with them bugs” that day.

  No matter what key words she put into her school tablet’s search engine, the results didn’t show anything even close to what was in front of her. Her daddy had given her a big book for identifying insects, arthropods, and other bugs, with pictures of almost every known tiny creature with four or more legs discovered around the world. After a half hour of flipping through it, she still hadn’t found anything.

  “What are you?” she asked it. The bug didn’t answer.

  Finally, she took a couple of pictures of it with the tablet and logged in to the secret Twitter account her parents didn’t know she had. Anyone seen an insect like this before? she typed, then uploaded the pictures. She hit tweet, looked up from the tablet, and saw that the mason jar was empty.

  “Uh…”

  The top was still screwed on tight.

  “But how…?”

  She picked up the jar and found a hole—a perfectly circular hole—in the side.

  “What?”

  A noise at the window made her look over. There was the weird bug, and it was using its front legs to burn a hole through the mesh screen.

  “WHAT!”

  It looked back at her, then leaped through the hole and outside. Ruby tore off down the stairs—“How many times have I told you not to run around this house like an elephant!”—and ran outside, but she saw no sign of the green-eyed, six-legged, glass-cutting, metal-burning bug.

  Half an hour later, Ruby still hadn’t found it and was sitting on the front porch trying to figure out how she was going to explain the hole in her window screen. Out of nowhere three black sedans came zooming down the street, pulled up in front of the house, and a bunch of white men in suits got out. This was never, ever a good thing, even in a safe neighborhood like hers.

  “Grammaaaaaaaaa!” she shouted as she ran inside.

  “What, girl, what is it?” Gramma asked, unconcerned until she saw the men on her porch. Her body went stiff and her expression turned stony. “Can I help you?”

  One of the white men, with hair cut so short he was almost bald, stepped up to the door.

  “Ma’am, I’m Agent Gerrold.” He flashed a badge too fast to show what he was an agent of, exactly. “We’re looking for…” He checked his smartphone, looked at Gramma over his dark glasses, then down to Ruby. “Are you @LilEntomologist on Twitter?”

  “She’s only eleven,” Gramma said. “She ain’t allowed on Twitter yet.”

  Agent Gerrold kept staring at Ruby.

  “Yeah,” Ruby admitted in a mumbly voice. She could already feel the whuppin’ she was gonna get for creating another secret account.

  “Where is this?” He turned his screen to show the picture of the bug she’d tweeted earlier.

  “What in h—! What is that?” Gramma said in a very familiar-to-Ruby tone.

  “I don’t know where it is,” she said. “It escaped after I posted that.”

  “Escaped where?” Gramma shrieked. “Is that thing somewhere in my house?!”

  Ruby had a feeling she wasn’t gonna be able to sit for a month. “No, Gramma! It ate through the screen and escaped out the window!” That was not the thing to say to make her calm down.

  “Ate through?” Gramma looked like she was gonna drop to the floor right then.

  “Ma’am.” The agent stepped forward like he was fixing to catch her, then stepped back when she shot a look at him. “Ma’am, please stay calm. The specimen won’t hurt you.”

  “The specimen?” Gramma and Ruby said at the same time.

  “It’s a Reduvius Zelus longipes bug from the Amazonian rain forest. They don’t attack humans. They only use their powerful saliva to kill the other insects they eat and to escape from danger.”

  “So it’s going to eat up my house?”

  “No, ma’am. It only wanted to escape. It probably came in the house looking for warmth. They’re not used to our climate. They’re also skittish and don’t like human contact, so it likely ran away from the structure.”

  The agent was talking in a calm and authoritative tone. Ruby recognized it from her mama, who used that voice on patients who were freaked out about going to the dentist. It was calming Gramma down, so Ruby didn’t tell him that she knew he was talking nonsense. Reduvius Zelus longipes was the scientific name for a type of assassin bug. She’d read all about those. That thing she caught earlier didn’t look anything like any assassin bug she’d ever seen a picture of.

  Plus, who sent out three cars full of white men in suits to track down an assassin bug?

  “The species is invasive and doesn’t have natural predators here. To be safe, we’re going to search the whole area and we need you to stay inside.”

  Gramma was calming down and starting to be skeptical again. “Over one bug from the Amazon?”

  “They kill bees, ma’am,” the agent said very seriously. “You know what will happen if the bees die.”
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  That made Gramma gasp. Everyone in this house knew the importance of bees, thanks to Ruby.

  “I understand,” Gramma said, pulled her granddaughter inside, and closed the door.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Ruby and Gramma watched the G-men (as Gramma kept calling them) from the windows as they searched the neighborhood. Their house was near the corner, so from upstairs Ruby could track them pretty far down the block and on the cross street. They were using fancy equipment—far too fancy for finding a bug. Something else must be going on, but what?

  She grabbed her tablet to see if anyone had responded to her tweet. No one had. In fact, the tweet was gone from her account. And before she had a chance to be mad about that, the tablet flashed a message that it was resetting to factory defaults.

  “No, wait!” she yelled like it would do any good. It didn’t. She didn’t even have time to save the photos from the gallery. In a few seconds the tablet was rebooting, the little android’s guts spinning and spinning on the screen.

  The school had the ability to trigger a factory reset at any time, but they only bothered to do that when a tablet was stolen. Ruby peered out the window at the men, frowning. This was their fault. Somehow, they’d gotten into her Twitter account and her tablet and erased the evidence of the strange bug. No way this was some common assassin bug. Something big was going on.

  The tablet would be useless for a while, so she turned on her xCUBE game console to see if any of her friends were on and chatting. Her cousin Hollie and friends Brandon and Alberto were in a voice chat room for the game Neon Crisis Avengers. When she entered, Ruby saw that only Alberto was playing—the other two were watching and talking.

  “… they’re parked in front of Ruby’s house. You think she’s in trouble?” she heard Brandon say once she got in. He lived down the block and was always ready for someone else to be in trouble because then it wouldn’t just be him.

  “No, I’m not!” she said defiantly.

  “But I bet you know what’s going on,” her cousin Hollie said. “Where did all these white people come from?”

  “I dunno. They said they’re with the government. They came looking for that bug I tweeted about.”

  “You’re back on Twitter?” Hollie now sounded all adult and fake disappointed.

  “You’re definitely gonna get in trouble,” Brandon sang. Such a brat.

  “Only if my parents find out.”

  “And they certainly will,” Hollie said.

  Brandon sucked his teeth. “Not you acting like you’re not gonna be the one to tell them.”

  “I would never!” Hollie said. “Ruby’s my bestie, I wouldn’t get her in trouble on purpose. I’m just concerned.” Hollie was only a year older than Ruby but she acted like she was grown. The way she said concerned sounded just like her mom, Ruby’s aunt Peggy.

  “As long as everyone keeps quiet there’s no need for concern.” Ruby mimicked Hollie, giggling. “Anyway, those government men are looking for the weird bug because they say it’s dangerous to the environment.”

  “This feels extra for a single bug,” Hollie said.

  “Not if it’s poisonous,” Brandon said. “Or if it lays eggs inside of bird nests. Or if it crawls in your ear at night and eats your brain!”

  “Brandon, ew! Why you always gotta be so revolting?” She could tell Hollie was scratching in her ear just thinking about it.

  “Y’all are so distracting,” Alberto said before yelling at an enemy who’d used a special move on him. “Die-die-die-die, you absolute … asparagus!”

  “Please, you’ve played this level seventy million times and have it memorized,” Hollie said. “Good save, though, did your papi walk in?”

  “Yes,” he said all terse. Alberto’s fathers felt that his “foul language was getting out of control” and had been threatening to take his actual controllers away if he didn’t clean up his language and stop cursing. He’d been getting creative about it ever since. “Leave me alone, I’m trying to beat the international high score!”

  Alberto was the best gamer in school—in almost the whole city. He’d won three local tournaments and a few online ones. If his fathers weren’t so overprotective he would have his own Twitch and YouTube channels and be an eSports star already, Ruby was sure of it.

  “That bug they’re looking for ain’t poisonous and it won’t eat your brain,” Ruby said using her very grown-up scientist voice. Though she wasn’t sure if what she was saying was true. Assassin bugs didn’t eat brains but the thing she had caught was NOT an assassin bug.

  She went over to the screen to study the hole it had made. A perfect circle. And the metal did look melty, like it had been burned. The mason jar’s hole had smooth edges, too, not even a sliver of glass sticking out. Maybe that’s what it looked like when glass melted. So this thing could generate heat with its legs? She decided not to mention that. Hollie was freaked out enough already.

  When she put her headset back on, the game was paused and their friends Jackie and Mayson had come into the chat.

  “They told us we had to stay inside for safety and my mom is mad,” Mayson was saying. She lived on the next street over and the G-men had just started closing off traffic there and sweeping backyards with the instruments. “She says it’s a government plot to get into our business.”

  “Your mom thinks everything’s a government plot,” Brandon said.

  “Your mama—” Mayson started, but she was drowned out by a horn noise that made Ruby wince and pull her headset partially off.

  “You know the rules!” Jackie, the originator of the noise, said. “No Yo Mama jokes in this chat. We don’t want another incident.”

  That was true. None of them wanted to relive the great Yo Mama war of Christmas break. It had lasted over a month, with the insults going from funny to convoluted and finally to downright mean. Feelings got hurt and people stayed mad for days. It got so bad that their actual mamas had to get involved and broker a peace. That’s when they made the rule: no Yo Mama jokes and no “fake” trash talk in game chat. Not among themselves, at least.

  “Fine,” Mayson said. “My mom is right, anyway.”

  If eye-rolls had a noise they all made it. Mayson’s mom was one of the only white people who lived in the neighborhood and everyone thought she was odd. She watched the Strange Truth: Fact or Fiction TV show and read lots of books about UFOs, so of course she went right to conspiracies.

  “Those men are in my backyard right now,” Alberto said, resuming the game. “If they mess up my papi’s garden they better pray he never finds them.”

  Ruby heard Gramma coming up the stairs talking on the phone. “They’re all the way over there? Lord Jesus, all this fuss over a bug.”

  “Whatever’s going on I hope they get done soon. My dad was about to go to the store,” Brandon said.

  “Out of Brie again?” Hollie teased.

  “As a matter of fact, yes. We need it to make our pear-and-Brie tart for dessert.”

  “You and your weird fancy food.”

  “Hey, you leave his fancy food alone,” Ruby said. Brandon may have been a brat, but he loved to cook, just like his parents. She appreciated the scientific approach he took to it. Plus, he always shared the leftovers at lunch.

  “Who you talking to?” Gramma asked, poking her head into the room.

  “Hollie and them.”

  Gramma nodded and was about to leave when she spotted the hole in the screen. “What in—Is that what that thing did??”

  “Gotta go.” Ruby logged off, not wanting to give Brandon any more ammo.

  “How big was that thing!” Gramma said, pointing to the two-inch-wide hole. It was just big enough to horrify.

  “I don’t know, I didn’t get a good look.” She slid the mason jar under the bed with her foot while Gramma was focused on the screen.

  “They better find that thing.” Now she was looking down at the men who were still searching the backyard next door. A coupl
e of them went across the street toward Witchypoo’s.

  No one had properly seen Witchypoo since before Ruby was born. The only time she appeared at her door was to call for her dogs or to bring her mail and groceries in, and she only did those things when it was near dark. Her yard was crowded with big trees, bushes, and overgrown grass; the house covered in vines and weeds. Even when she did step out you still might not see her. Witchypoo never let anyone in and everyone in the neighborhood avoided her house—Ruby and her friends never even went past it on the same side of the street.

  The older kids had told them Witchypoo would hide in the bushes and jump out to grab you if you walked by. Plus, she had two big, mean dogs that she left loose in the unfenced backyard. They loved to chase kids riding by on bikes.

  Gramma sucked her teeth. “Good luck searching in that jungle.”

  The G-men didn’t get the chance. As soon as they got near the house, the dogs came around from the other side barking and growling. The men stopped and looked like they were discussing what to do about them when an old Black woman came out the back door to add to the noise.

  That has to be Witchypoo, Ruby thought. She definitely looked like a witch, wearing only a housecoat and a worn scarf that barely contained her ratty gray hair.

  “Get on outta here!” she yelled at them. It was almost funny—a tiny Black woman waving her arms around trying to chase away two big government men. Except those men were white, and who knows what they would do to her … or the dogs.

  “Oh Lord, I’d better go out there,” Gramma said.

  “But they said to stay inside.”

  “We all gonna have more problems than invasive species if she keeps going on like that. You stay here.” She started dialing someone on the phone as she went. “And put some tape over that hole. Don’t need any other bugs getting in.”

  Ruby taped up the screen while watching what went down. Gramma marched outside and got between Witchypoo and the men. She was trying to order both of them around at once, telling Witchypoo to take the dogs inside while also telling the men they needed to back off until she did. The men were also yelling, telling Gramma to step back and warning Witchypoo that she needed to get her animals under control. The dogs were mad at everybody and getting madder by the second. After a couple minutes the agent who had come to Ruby’s door showed up and waved the other men off. Once they moved to the other side of the street Agent Gerrold stepped back and let Gramma convince Witchypoo to come inside. She finally went … after making a bunch of rude gestures that would have gotten Ruby punished for life.