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door after White and Gower, then climbed into the front passenger seat. I wasn’t sure I disagreed, though I didn’t protest about the arm or the fact that Martini had pulled me closer. I felt safer next to him for some reason, illogical or not.
    Our usual driver and pilot took the wheel. “Care to tell me who this is?” I asked White.
    “James Reader,” White answered, somewhat reluctantly I thought.
    “I’m a human, like you,” Reader said, turning around and flashing me a toothy grin. “I actually was a male model, if you want an autograph.”
    I felt my jaw drop. “Oh, my God, I recognize you! You did the big Calvin Klein spread a few years ago that raised so much controversy.”
    “Which one was that ?” Gower asked. “Isn’t controversial pretty much the definition of a Calvin Klein ad campaign?”
    Reader grinned again. It was an awesome grin, making Martini’s seem just ordinary. “Mine had the most controversy. Then I retired at the height of my fame to pursue my passions. Which was the cover story for joining up with this crew.” He winked at me. “Don’t worry, babe. They’re okay. Odd in their way, but okay. I’ll look out for you, even keep the horndog here at bay if you want me to.”
    “He really is gay,” Martini said.
    “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna let anyone hassle my homegirl here,” Reader said as he turned around. “We humans have to watch each other’s backs, or you aliens are gonna take all the credit for saving the world.” Reader started the car, and we drove off.
    I looked out the windows—there were several gray SUVs moving out with us. “All the boys coming along?”
    “All the ones here, yes,” White said. “We have to make sure you’re protected.”
    “Um, why?”
    “You were identified as stopping a terrorist, who the media have decided was part of the Al Dejahl terrorist organization,” Christopher answered in a clipped tone. I got the feeling Gower was right—he wasn’t happy about this screw up. “That’ll alert any superbeings who might be in control to the fact you’re a threat.”
    “Great. So, what planet are you from?”
    Gower was the one who answered, which I found interesting. “We can’t pronounce our native language here—humans can’t understand it.”
    “Worse than Yiddish,” Martini added.
    Gower rolled his eyes. “Jeff, shut up. We’re from the Alpha Centauri system. You call our suns Alpha Centauri A and B. We call them, well, the big sun and the little sun. And our world, the world. In our own language, of course. People are more alike than you’d realize, even people from different planets.”
    “So, you’re saying you’re humans?” I was taking this very well and was rather proud of myself.
    “No, only Earth has humans. There are real differences, significant ones.”
    “We’re better in bed,” Martini whispered to me.
    “Jeff!” Gower looked as fed up as he sounded. “Give it a rest for the whole five minutes it’ll take me to explain this.”
    “Fine,” Martini sighed. He slid down in the seat a bit. “I’ll behave.”
    Gower gave him a look that said he didn’t believe a word of it, then went on. “We were one of the planets the original aliens warned, just like Earth. We call the aliens Ancients, because their race was much older than ours. The ship that arrived at our planet didn’t crash, but the crew couldn’t survive in our atmosphere. The ones who landed here would have died as well. Their world, we’ve figured out, was a lot closer, spacewise, to the one the parasites came from than ours or yours, and it made them very different from our two races.”
    “They reached our world a hundred years before yours,” White added. “We didn’t have good enough space travel to reach any other inhabited world for decades after they landed, though.”
    Gower nodded. “We got most of what we needed from the Ancients’ spaceship. Just as Earth scientists did and are still doing today. But