Katherine Katt.

Universal Alien.

Gini Koch.

To the memories of all those we've loved who are gone from us too soon in this world-somewhere in the multiverse we're still together laughing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I know I sound like a broken record, but first and foremost I have to thank my wonderful editor and agent, Sheila Gilbert and Cherry Weiner, for always taking care of me and being incredibly fun, supportive, and patient while doing so. Couldn't do it without my fantastic crit partner, Lisa Dovichi and my main beta readers, Mary Fiore and Veronica Cook. Sure, they're my mum and daughter, but they don't have to read the final drafts in a day-they just do because they know I need them to.

As always, love and thanks always to all the good folks at DAW Books and Penguin, to all my fans around the globe, my Hook Me Up! Gang, members of Team Gini, all Alien Collective Members in Very Good Standing, Twitter followers, Facebook fans and friends, Pinterest followers, and all the wonderful fans who come to my various book signings and conference panels-you're all the best and I wouldn't want to do this without each and every one of you along for the ride.

Special shout-outs to: Joseph Gaxiola and Colette Chmiel for continuing to be the best a.s.sistants anyone could have, near and far both; Missy Katano for help with many things military and Lynn Crain for help with many things diplomatic and Alphabet Agency related; Tamara Baker, Moskintia, Dee Haddrill, and my other Aussie fans for helping me with all things Australian any time of day or night; Dan King, for hooking me up with Moskintia; Chrysta Stuckless, Missy Katano, Mariann Asanuma, Jan Robinson, Terry Smith, and Koren Cota for all the delicious and lovely things you've bestowed on me to keep me going; Oliver & Blanca Bernal for always having a welcoming home; Adrian & Lisa Payne, Hal & Dee Astell, Andrea & Duncan Rittschoff, and Stacy Stolz & Gordon Drinovsky for always supporting me wherever I go; Jennifer Stuckless for some awesome fan art; Raul Padron for late night Cuban language a.s.sistance; my Paranormal Romance Dream Team pals-authors Caris Roane, Erin Kellison, and Erin Quinn-for laughs, advice, and solidarity; my Wyked Women Who Write friends-authors Jordan Summers, T.M. Williams, Sharon Skinner, T.L. Smith, and Marsheila Rockwell-for fun times at cons and while eating cupcakes, and for being there when I needed help, teasing, or someone to veg out with; all the members of The Stampeding Herd-Lisa Dovichi, Barb Tyler, Lynn Crain, Hal Astell, and Marsheila Rockwell-for ensuring that I always have someone to run with, metaphorically speaking; Mysterious Galaxy San Diego and The Poisoned Pen Scottsdale for support at cons, events, and book signings; Craig & Stephanie Dyer, Brad "My Man" Jensen, Joseph "Pick A Nickname" Gaxiola & Edward "GF #1" Pulley, Duncan & Andrea Rittschoff, Adrian & Lisa Payne, and Linda Johnson for fantastic and much needed help during Phoenix Comicon; Chris "Delicious" Swanson for extreme late night brainstorming; Robert Palsma for ensuring I know someone likes me every day; awesome author L.E. Modesitt, Jr. for excellent advice and friendship; Missy Katano (gettin' the hat trick) for her detailed work on cataloging and more for the earlier books in the series; and especially Emily Albee, aka Amadhia, for letting me bring her into Kitty's worlds.

Last but never least, thanks and love as always to my husband, Steve, and daughter, Veronica. I wouldn't trade the two of you for anything, not even superpowers and a host of hotties in Armani. Honest.

THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF INDIA, Abdul Kalam, shared a lovely sentiment-Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.

He's totally right that we're not alone, of course. But with all due respect, former president Kalam is dead wrong about the entire universe being friendly to us. There are a lot of "others" out there, and while some are all for helping good ol' Earth, there are plenty who think we should be avoided, enslaved, or destroyed.

George Carlin said that if it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

I know he's right. I just know there's more out there than we've seen. I look for it, sometimes, when I feel alone. I look for all the "others" out there. So far, unless they're in a comic or a book or a movie, I haven't found them.

I'm not sure what's actually more surreal-that the universe is teeming with life of all kinds, or that I've somehow gone from being a single marketing manager to the wife of the Vice President of the United States in just under five years.

Oh sure, it was a long road between "there" and "here"-much of it filled with fights against many very bad things, both extraterrestrial and very terrestrial. Humans are really the worst though. We're devious and nasty on a scale that, thankfully so far, none of the aliens showing up to visit or move in seem able to manage. I'll take a fugly s.p.a.ce monster over most of the human megalomaniacs I've dealt with over the years.

Being married to an alien, at least one from Alpha Four of the Alpha Centauri system, has definitely been the highlight. Well, our hybrid and scary-talented daughter is a highlight, too. Jeff and Jamie make all the change and general surreality that has become my daily life worthwhile.

Sometimes, I wonder what it's all about. I mean, I have a pretty great life, and I love my family. I'm a good wife, mother, and daughter, and I do things that matter. But there are days when I just can't do anything right, and I wonder what's wrong with me.

Oh, of course, I have bad days. Sadly, since becoming the Second Lady, or whatever I'm really supposed to be called now, there's a lot of pressure. Shockingly, with more public scrutiny comes more ways for me to screw up. And there are days when I wonder what's wrong with me.

Sometimes, I just want to see what it would be like, if things were just a little different. Maybe not a whole lot different, just enough to where I could do something more, be something more . . . be something else.

Sometimes, I just want to know what it would be like if I was me, but maybe a little less unwillingly famous and a whole lot more competent on the regular people things I sometimes seem incapable of managing with anything resembling smoothness or competence.

Some days, I just want to be somewhere else. A place where I do everything right.

Some days, I'd really like to be somewhere else. Where everything I do is right.

Hey . . . is there an echo in here?.

CHAPTER 1.

MY BRAINS OOZED out of my ears.

Not from being shot or something. From boredom. Ma.s.sive, stultifying boredom. Boredom on a scale so epic I didn't think anyone could really fathom it. I could barely fathom it and I was living it.

Cheers went up from those around me. Well, not most of those immediately around me. I was surrounded by Americans. Sure, more than half of them were actually aliens only one, two, or zero generations out from Alpha Four in the Alpha Centauri system, but still, beings that lived in America and had been raised as Americans. And this was not an American pastime.

"You're sure this is cricket? I mean, the game. The game that millions of people around the world supposedly love?"

This earned me a dirty look from everyone near me, American or no. I'd tried to keep my voice low, but apparently cricket shared something in common with golf, that most boring of Scottish games that had infected the U.S., in that the fans were hushed unless something "exciting" was happening on the field.

I wasn't actually sitting next to my husband. As the newly minted Vice President of these non-cricket-mad United States, Jeff was sitting a couple of rows below me with now-President Armstrong and the Australian Prime Minister. Technically, as his wife, I should have been sitting with them.

Wiser heads had prevailed, however. Despite a great deal of effort and patience on the part of the Head of the C.I.A.'s Extra-Terrestrial Division and the American Centaurion Public Relations Minister-otherwise known as Charles Reynolds and Rajnish Singh-and a week's worth of immersion therapy, I still hadn't been able to grasp or enjoy cricket.

Since we'd been in our mid-twenties Chuckie had lived half the year in Australia, and Raj had been born and raised in New Delhi. Ergo, they both actually enjoyed cricket. In fact, Raj was quite a rabid fan, and Chuckie had an Aussie team he supported. Meaning if anyone was going to get this game through to me, it should have been them.

Only, it took the complexity of baseball, the slowness of golf, and the bizarreness of croquet, and managed to turn them into something that, sports lover though I was, I just couldn't manage to follow, let alone like.

The hope had been that I'd pick up enough to have the light bulb go off while watching a live match and suddenly become an expert. Hope might have sprung eternal, but it was definitely being dashed against the wicket today, because I still wasn't sure where the wicket was, let alone what it was or why it existed other than to be the current bane of my existence.

It didn't help matters much that the entire point of this extravaganza was the Australian government's visiting to show support for both the new administration in particular but also aliens in general.

Because of Operation Destruction, the entire world knew aliens lived here. The entire world also knew that there were a lot of different alien races out there, and that some of them really hated humanity. Of course, some of them liked us just fine, in part because we'd given the exiled A-Cs a home.

However, there were still a lot of people around the world who felt that aliens were the worst things to hit Earth, and they wanted us gone. Off the planet, in work camps, or merely wiped off the face of the Earth, they weren't picky. What with Jeff and then-Senator and now-President Armstrong's surprise landslide win, knowing an alien was a heartbeat away from the presidency had all these anti-alien groups in a tizzy of epic proportions.

Australia had its share of alien haters. Club 51, our biggest, most coordinated anti-alien enemy, had made a lot of inroads into Australia, meaning one of America's biggest allies had a huge anti-alien population.

So it was vital for us to make the Australian Prime Minister and his retinue feel happy and comfortable. The PM was a huge cricket fan, hence this game. That I was supposed to feign excitement about.

Wished I'd studied acting instead of business in college, because, despite my desire to be a good wife and representative of my const.i.tuents, I was failing to convince anyone that I liked this sport.

The fact that we'd spent money to fix up the stadium where the Redskins played football to look like a cricket field didn't help. They weren't my team-we might live in D.C. now, but I remained true to my Arizona Cardinals and their tradition of usually losing-but I'd have committed many major felonies to have seen the Redskins trot onto the field and toss the pigskin around. I couldn't pick a Redskins player out of a lineup, but still, football was a sport I understood and enjoyed.

I loved baseball, too, but neither the Washington Nationals nor my beloved Diamondbacks were going to be showing up to save my day. There were lots of guys on the field who, according to the program, were quite cute. Not that you could really see them. So I didn't have that distraction going for me. And when I could see them, they were standing around in a giant circle or running back and forth along a small strip of dirt in the middle of the field far, far away. For whatever reason, this didn't make my Sports Gene go wild.

My phone beeped and I dug it out of my purse. At a normal sporting event I'd never have heard it. At this one, not a problem. Of course, I wasn't supposed to spend time on my phone when we were at public events, but our daughter wasn't with us and the text could be about her.

Sadly, it was from the head of Alpha Team. James Reader was none-too-gently suggesting I plaster a look of enjoyment onto my face. He wasn't technically at this event-Alpha Team's job was to protect, not to be the face of American Centaurion. Had no idea where in the stadium Reader and the others actually were, other than nowhere I could see them. However, they could see me, and I looked, if I took his text to be accurate, "like you're about to die while pa.s.sing gas."

I replied with one word: "charming." Wanted to say other words. But my Secret Service detail had clued me in-I had no such thing as privacy anymore.

Dropped my phone back into my purse as people nearby gasped. Something was happening on the field. It appeared to be exciting, based on the crowd's increased murmuring. Couldn't tell what the heck it was. Looked around. Right now would be a great time for a parasitic superbeing to form, or for an intergalactic invasion to happen, or anything else that would alleviate the boredom. Waited hopefully. Nothing. Apparently the Powers That Be liked cricket. Or had been bored into inactivity.

"When is the halftime or intermission or whatever?" I asked Raj. Again, tried to keep my voice down, but apparently the acoustics in this stadium were great, because I got another host of dirty looks.

"There isn't really a break like that, as I've explained." He managed not to add "over and over again," but I could see the thought written on his face. "We're watching a T-Twenty game, so there will be a short intermission in about an hour."

We'd already been watching this for an hour and had been sitting here even longer. I wasn't sure I could stay conscious for another hour without moving around. And there were at least two more hours to get through after the short intermission. And this was a "short" game. "Real" cricket could go on for days. This game had to have been created to torture political prisoners. Wondered if I could invoke the Geneva Conventions as a way out of the boredom. Probably not. My luck never went that way.

Plus I was uncomfortable. Under normal circ.u.mstances-you know, before my husband had somehow become the Vice President-I'd have been in jeans, my Converse, an Aerosmith thermal of some kind, and my nice, warm snow jacket. Or I'd have been in what the A-Cs, who were love slaves to black, white, and Armani, always wore-a black slim skirt, a white oxford, and black pumps, with a long black trench coat.

Because we were now some of the most public of figures, I was required to pay a lot more attention to what I was wearing. I'd also been a.s.signed my own color-iced blue. I was in iced blue as much as I'd been in black and white before. In fact, I missed black and white, I was in this blue so much nowadays. This meant that for this event I was in an iced blue pantsuit, an off-white Angora sweater, and neutral high-heeled boots. And pearls. Supposedly I looked great. I felt remarkably stupid dressed like this at a sporting event.

Chuckie got a text and grunted. "You need to pretend to be having fun," he said. Either his voice hadn't carried or everyone else agreed with him, because no one shot the Evil Eye toward us.

"I'm trying."

"It's not working."

Made up my mind. "Then, I'm out of here."

CHAPTER 2.

"WHAT THE h.e.l.l?" Chuckie sounded ready to lose it, though he managed to keep his voice down.

"You can't leave," Raj said, as he tried to watch the so-called action on the field and look at me at the same time, with limited success.

"No freaking duh. I'm going to the concession stand. Now."

Raj, sensing that the emergency was about a negative three on a scale of one to ten, turned his full attention back to the match.

"Couldn't we just send someone?" Chuckie asked, sounding relieved. "You're going to have to go with a contingent, and that's going to be noticed."

"I need to piddle." I didn't, but I needed to splash cold water on my face and drink about a gallon of coffee to make it through this ordeal. Of course, I was in makeup, so cold water on my face was probably out. It was also February and we were outdoors in the freezing cold. I was at risk of dying from hypothermia as well as boredom. Hypothermia sounded better.

Chuckie heaved a sigh. "The Secret Service has to escort you."

"Fine. They probably want some coffee and to use the bathroom, too."

This earned me a dirty look I chose to ignore. I got up. The entire row behind me got up as well. There was some grumbling from the crowd behind us. I had no idea how, but we'd somehow packed this stadium with every cricket fan in, by my guess, the entire United States. Maybe we'd imported them from Europe or something. Regardless of the statistics Raj had thrown at me, I couldn't believe that more than about fifty thousand Americans liked this sport.

The row behind me was made up of my wide variety of bodyguards, of which my Secret Service detail was only a part. This detail included two women and four men-the wives of Vice Presidents rarely got as much security as I rated, but apparently, my reputation had preceded me.

All of the Secret Service agents a.s.signed to us had picked up cricket in less than a day and understood the sport. They didn't love the sport, but they understood it. They, like everyone else, had given it the Old College Try in terms of teaching me. Unlike everyone else, they'd given up quicker. I respected their intelligence and ability to identify a lost cause quickly.

Two of the other men behind me were Len Parker and Kyle Constantine. I'd met them right before Jeff and I got married, when they were still playing football for USC. They graduated into the C.I.A. and had been the bodyguards Chuckie had a.s.signed to me early on in our stint in D.C. Len and Kyle both understood cricket, but as former football players, felt it wasn't a real sport. This made me love them even more than I already did.

The others were from Centaurion Division. Four A-C agents, one human. The human guy was Burton Falk, who I felt actually reported up to the person who was most likely coordinating the majority of my actual protection-Malcolm Buchanan.

Buchanan had been a.s.signed to me by the Head of the Presidential Terrorism Control Unit, also known as my mother. Mom had put her best operative onto me and my daughter, Jamie, at about the same time Chuckie had a.s.signed Len and Kyle to me. There was never a day I didn't appreciate Mom's protective instincts, because Buchanan had saved our lives quite a number of times.

He wasn't here, that I could see. He had Dr. Strange powers, and if he didn't want you to see him, you didn't see him. He insisted it was just training. I didn't believe him.

However, while I didn't see him in the stadium, I knew he was nearby, watching for threats to my safety. Sadly, Buchanan was no help in terms of the threat to my sanity currently being perpetrated on the field.

Of course, my getting up meant that everyone on one side of me had to get up, too. Because Chuckie was the smartest guy in any cricket audience, he'd put himself in the aisle seat and had me right next to him, meaning he was the only one who had to stand to let me out.

He heaved another sigh and offered his hand. "I'll go, too. Why not? It's not like this is the first match I've seen in ages or anything."

"Wow, bitter much? You can stay. I'm sure my thirteen other protectors can handle my trip to the bathroom."

"Advise Cosmos that Cyclone and Playboy are on the move," Evalyne said quietly into her lapel. She was the head of my Secret Service detail. The Secret Service gave out nicknames to those they were protecting. Based on Chuckie's wealth, position within the C.I.A., proximity to us, and personal relationship with me and the rest of American Centaurion, he was considered one of those under protection.

A Secret Service agent next to Jeff nudged him. Jeff turned around. Chuckie c.o.c.ked his head, Jeff shared an obvious "go with her" sign. Chuckie nodded, and I gave up. Gave him my hand, he helped me out of the aisle, then took my elbow and helped me up the stairs to the concourse. Cameras flashed.

"Great," he muttered.

"Yes, this is us, off to have our torrid affair with my husband's blessing and a baker's dozen of witnesses. We're so smooth, you and me."

He laughed. "It's amazing how you make it sound ridiculous and the tabloids make it sound like we're actually committing adultery every five seconds."

"It's one of my many gifts. You know what's weird?" I asked as we reached the concourse level. "When it bothered Jeff, it didn't bother you. Now that he just finds it amusingly annoying, you find it distressing."