“She told us the same about you,” said Riley, dropping my hand. “We raised her to understand operational security, didn’t we, Shelly?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that, Daddy.” Shelby finally unpeeled herself from his arm. She trotted back toward the car, pausing long enough to kiss my cheek as she passed. “I told you, it’s Shelby. That’s my name.”

“We call Raina ‘Ray,’ and we call Gabrielle ‘Gabby,’ so you should put up with it; we’re your parents,” said Riley. He sounded amused; this was apparently a conversation they had with some frequency. Shelby responded with a snort.

Shelby’s mother, meanwhile, had finally gotten out of the car. “The girls will get your luggage,” she said, walking over to stand next to me. “You look like you’re about to drop dead where you stand. Let’s get you inside and to a bed before you collapse.”

“I’m not that tired,” I lied. The trip was catching up with my body, which was protesting the change of time zones and hemispheres in the only way it knew how: with growing fatigue. “Can I get a few old boxes for the mice to use while I’m here? They’ll be less trouble if they have a designated place to go when they’re not demanding I do something for them.”

“Hail!” squeaked the mouse on my shoulder, like a demented punctuation generator.

Shelby’s mother smiled. “I think we can find something. This way.” She started walking. I followed.

I hadn’t really noticed the lack of a house when Shelby’s father appeared outside my window: I was more focused on the gun, and what it could mean for my future. Now that I was following Shelby’s mother into increasingly thick brush, the lack of a house was becoming more pressing. “Er,” I said, and stopped, unsure how to proceed.

Fortunately for me, this seemed to be the opening line of a question she’d heard before. “We don’t have a driveway,” she said. “This is where we park the car—and no, that’s not an Australian thing, it’s a family thing. We have to carry our groceries a little farther, but we don’t get surprised by visitors.”

“You’re going to get on splendidly with my mother,” I said. “Speaking of which, and I don’t know how to say this without sounding awkward, but. . . .Shelby never told me your name. I’m happy to keep calling you ‘Ms. Tanner,’ if that’s your preference. I just wanted to ask.”

“Charlotte,” said Shelby’s mother. “You can call me ‘Ms. Tanner’ if that’s what you’re comfortable with or ‘Lottie’ if you feel like being more informal.” She swept aside a curtain of dangling branches, revealing a swath of wide, open ground covered with the glowing fuzz of new-grown grass. Something that I would have taken for a kangaroo, if it hadn’t been covered in rosette spots like a leopard, was cropping at the grass within a small enclosure. There was also a house, three stories high and rising against the sky like a monument to human habitation, but it seemed somehow less important than the animal I’d never seen before.

Charlotte followed my gaze to the enclosure, and said, “We don’t know what she is. She wandered in one morning with a broken leg—we thought she’d been painted at first, but the dots wouldn’t wash off. So we built her a pen, and we’ve been studying her, trying to suss out her story. Could be she’s a chromatic mutant. Could also be she’s a member of a highly endangered species, and explains some of the periodic ‘leopard’ sightings that we’ve never been able to figure out. Either way, we’re taking care of her until we understand her story a little better.”

“Neat,” I said. I felt immediately silly, but that didn’t change the accuracy of the word. Mysterious, leopard-spotted kangaroos were definitely neat, no matter how immature that sounded.

Charlotte smiled indulgently and kept walking. I could hear cracking noises and footsteps coming from the brush behind us as the rest of the family followed with the luggage. That, more than anything, motivated me to speed up and match pace with Charlotte as she bounded up the porch steps and opened the screen door. Shelby’s sister had been grumpy enough before she was forced to carry my suitcase through a stretch of carefully cultivated forest.

“Come on, Alex,” said Charlotte. “Jet lag is going to catch up with you if you hold still for too long, and then you’ll fall asleep on the porch.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“Yes, but around four o’clock in the afternoon, the spiders come.” With that, she vanished inside. She was probably kidding—Australia has a lot of spiders, but as far as I know, they don’t keep to a strict schedule. “Probably” wasn’t a word I wanted to risk my life on.

Charlotte was already halfway across the living room and heading for the stairs by the time I made it through the front door. I hurried to catch up.

“You’ll be in the guest room, of course,” said Charlotte when I drew close enough, as calmly as if I’d never lagged behind. “It has locks on both the inside and outside, and I’ve mostly talked Riley into not locking you in at night, but you shouldn’t push it if you don’t have to. He’s not exactly keen on the fact that the American expert Shelby brought is also the man she’s sleeping with, if you follow. Says it smacks of trying to impress him with how suitable you are, when you’re clearly not suitable at all.”

“Er,” I said. “What makes me unsuitable?”

Charlotte gave me a look that, while kind, somehow managed to clearly indicate that I was being a fool, and should stop at once. “You’re dating our daughter, and you’re an American. You represent both ‘our little girl is growing up’ and ‘our little girl is having her loyalties divided.’ You were never going to be suitable. Not for a minute.”

“Ah,” I said, blinking.

Charlotte started up the stairs without waiting for any further reply. I followed her.

The stairs led to a hallway, which led in turn to a series of doors. Charlotte stopped in front of one of them, and said, “Guest room, attached toilet, so you should be taken care of. Wireless password is on the bedside table, and I’ll send Raina up with your bags while we debrief Shelly on the situation. You need to take a nap. No matter how much you feel like you’re at top operating condition, you’re wrong. Jet lag plays with your head. Gabby will be back by dinner, so I’ll send someone to wake you then.”