The sunlight from outside her father’s office didn’t illuminate much inside the safe, but something inside was moving. The rustle of papers and scratch of claws against metal echoed eerily in the shadows.

“Hello?” Reena whispered haltingly.

Two big, round eyes blinked at her from within the darkness, luminous rose-colored irises shimmering beneath two fuzzy eyebrows shaped like apostrophes. A furry face emerged, snout wiggling curiously.

“A red panda?” Reena gawked. “Why has Dad got a red panda inside his safe?”

The animal crept further into the light, and Reena scowled at its maroon and pink fur, its long striped tail bushy and twitching.

“Okay, not a red panda? A pink red panda? Is that a thing?” She bent over and braced her hands on her knees, staring at the furry creature. It was about the size of a large domestic cat.

The creature crawled out of the safe and perched on the edge of her father’s desk, blinking absently at Reena and scanning the room in silence.

Great.

What did she do now? It wasn’t like she could put the animal back in the safe. That would just be cruel. But if her father had it in there, it must have been for a reason. So she couldn’t let it roam around the house unchecked either.

“Maybe Dad didn’t know you were in there?” Reena stood up and scratched her head. “That’s unlikely though. It’s not as if red pandas are native to Kansas.”

The animal blinked at her.

A loud banging echoed from the kitchen.

“Uh oh.”

It wasn’t the garage. It wasn’t even a person. It was Hermes, her dad’s gigantic German Shepherd.

“I think you’re going to want to get back into the safe,” Reena muttered and turned just as the enormous dog skittered to a halt outside her father’s office.

Hermes locked on to the red panda instantly, hackles rising, hair along his spine bristling. The red panda had the same response, tail turning into a bottle brush, mouth open in a snarl as it reared up on its hind legs.

“Hermes!” Reena stepped in between the dog and the panda. “No! Go back outside!”

That wasn’t going to work. When Hermes looked like that only her dad could calm him down.

Behind her, the panda hissed and snarled. In front of her, Hermes had begun to growl, the terrifying thunderous warning he only used for UPS delivery guys and trick-or-treaters.

Reena took a step toward the massive dog. If he charged, she would have to dodge. He weighed more than she did, and she didn’t want to be between him and whatever he was trying to eat.

“Hermes,” she pitched her voice lower than normal, “come on, buddy. You don’t care about that silly red panda.”

Hermes growled more.

“It’s all furry,” Reena took another step. “You don’t want to eat it. Remember when you ate Cecilia’s mattress? It made you super sick. You eat this panda, and you’ll be coughing up pink furballs for a week!”

Hermes growled.

The panda grunted and squeaked.

“Hermes, let’s go find Mr. Bear.” Reena took another step toward him. “Don’t you want Mr. Bear? Mr. Bear is much more fun than—”

Hermes lunged for the red panda, and Reena dove to the side. The panda leaped off the desk and hit the floor, squeaking and grunting and scrambling on the wooden floors. Hermes stumbled on the office carpet and turned sharply to chase.

“Hermes, no! Stop!”

Reena clambered to her feet and raced after them. The giant dog snapped at the panda’s tail as it scurried under the dining room table, and Hermes turned chairs over trying to reach it.

“You guys are making a mess!”

The panda launched off the floor and hit the back of the sofa in the living room, crawling over the cushions and diving into the pillows. Hermes followed, landing with a heavy thump on the couch that sent the much-smaller panda sailing as though the cushions had been a trampoline.

It squeaked and hollered and flailed as it flew through the air and landed in a ball on the kitchen tile.

“Hermes! No! Stay!”

Hermes didn’t stay.

But the panda spotted the dog door.

“No, no, no, no!”

The panda bolted out the dog door, and Reena was on its heels. Snapping the door lock in place before Hermes could get there. Hermes slid to a halt and smashed into the wall, barking and scratching frantically.

“No!” Reena shouted at him. “You are in so much trouble!” She spun in a circle and ran to the window over the sink to peer into the backyard.

The panda trotted along the top of the fence.

“No!” Reena threw her hands in the air. “You’re in trouble too! You can’t leave!”

She snatched her bag from the table and darted for the garage, leaving Hermes to keep barking at the shut door. She strapped her helmet and elbow pads on as she seized her scooter.

The panda was already nearly out of sight by the time she made it outside.

It couldn’t escape. If her dad had it in his safe, it was there for a reason. She didn’t really know what her dad did for a living. She knew he worked at the FBI field office downtown. She knew he worked with other governmental agencies. She knew that he was involved in top secret projects that she wasn’t supposed to know about.

With her luck, she’d just released an evil alien that would try to conquer the world somehow.

Of course why her father had an evil alien that looked like a red panda locked in his safe was a different topic that they’d have to tackle later.

Number one priority: Get the pink red panda back!

She grabbed the metal case on the back wheel of her scooter and activated the electronics inside. She hadn’t really tested her electric scooter engine on the city streets, but there was no time like the present.

When the lights turned green, she cranked the throttle on the steering bar. The scooter shot forward. Reena kept her feet planted on the scooter and strained her eyes for the fleeing animal out in front of her.

There!

It was still hopping from fence to fence as it went north on Rutan Street. Reena bent over the steering bar and focused on the little creature as it loped away from her.

Her scooter couldn’t go as fast as a car, but it would go faster than a red panda could run.

The wind blurred her vision, and the whining of the electric motor filled her ears. They passed Third Street. The panda was on the sidewalk now, still dashing northward. Was it moving faster? How fast did red pandas run? She didn’t know anything about them, other than what she’d seen at the zoo.

Why was there a red panda in her father’s safe?

How could he have locked it in there without knowing about it?

Why had she felt drawn to let it out?

None of it made sense.

They’d barely passed Fourth Street when another dog in a yard came charging out at the panda. It spooked and scrambled and dashed down an unnamed side street toward Hillside.

“No, no, no!” Reena leaned into the sharp turn and barely missed the curb.

The side street led behind a hotel, a deli, and a pharmacy. The panda darted around parked cars and jumped onto trucks, bounding ahead of her down the sidewalk. It was going to reach Hillside easily, and it was going to get squashed.

“Wait!” Reena shouted after it.

The panda wasn’t listening.

A school-bus-yellow Camero with black racing stripes zoomed past them on the street, and the panda didn’t even hesitate. It leaped off a parked car and landed on the roof.

The Camero veered onto Hillside and gunned the engine in a plume of exhaust.

“Bad, very bad!” Reena added speed to her already-straining engine and checked for cross traffic before she shot across the intersection.

Ahead of her, the Camero with the panda on its roof swung westward on to Central.

That was even worse. How was she going to catch up to them? Her engine would burn up.

Backstreets.

The only option.

She cut through the Spangles parking lot and hopped the curb in front of the Starbucks. There was another back alley behind the strip mall that connected Lorraine to Chautauqua.

Her little engine whirred and whined, but it wasn’t squealing yet. Squealing was bad.

She increased the output again.

“God, don’t let anybody jump out in front of me!”

She raced down the back street and glanced to the north where the Camero was still visible bolting down Central.

She’d crossed Erie Street when the sound of shrieking brakes and droning horns filled the air. Through the parking lots she could see traffic piling up on Central as the Camero slammed on its brakes and sent the red panda sailing into the air.

The panda hit the street and rolled under cars and between tires and popped out safely on the sidewalk.

“Yes!” Reena rejoiced.

The panda got its bearings quickly and dashed down the sidewalk across Volutsia street into the brand new commercial development made of shipping containers.

“No!” Reena wailed and pushed her scooter faster. She hit the parking area of the first shipping container store just as the panda disappeared into the central plaza.

The shipping containers were all stacked on top of each other and housed several restaurants, clothing boutiques, and one trendy tattoo parlor. At the center was a fire pit, which wasn’t burning. Because summer.

And out front was an old stone cottage, the only original piece of construction left on the corner of Central and Volutsia. And inside it was a bookstore dedicated to steamy romance novels.

It was Cecilia’s favorite bookstore.

Reena ran around the corner of the courtyard just as the panda darted inside the open door into the shop.

“Bad, bad, bad, bad.” Reena raced up the ramp to the door and hurried inside.

The shop smelled like roses and pachouli and fresh journal pages and pencil shavings. Every nook and cranny of the shop had been utilized, packing it full of crocheted plushies and annotation supplies and bookshelf after bookshelf after bookshelf, each one crammed full of romance novels.

Reena paused.

Where had the panda gone?

She turned in a slow circle. The panda was nowhere in sight. How was that possible? It wasn’t on the shelves. It wasn’t on the book tables. It wasn’t in the ceiling rafters.

Where had it gone?

“Can I help you with something?”

Reena turned to face the bored looking college girl behind the register. The woman wasn’t really looking at her. She had her nose in a book and had spoken around it.

“No,” Reena said. “No, just—just browsing.”

A mom and her teenage daughter approached the register, and the worker started ringing up their purchases. The mother had several large hardback books. The daughter had one of the plushies from the pile in the corner.

“I wonder,” Reena mumbled.

She went and knelt at the base of the giant pile of plushies before she started sorting through them.

“Those are great books,” the gal at the register was saying. “The main couple is so romantic. I swooned.”

“I’ve been hearing great things about it,” the mother said.

Reena dug deep into the pile of plushies.

All of them were crocheted. It was beautiful work, really.

“That’s a cute one,” the register gal was saying, now to the daughter. “I don’t remember seeing that one in our stock.”

Reena tuned her droning voice out. There were hippo plushies and giraffe plushies and even a triceratops plushie. All very cute. All very detailed. All very plushie.

Not a single red panda among them.

“Thanks for shopping,” the register gal said. “Enjoy the day.”

Reena put all the plushies back on the stack and scowled at them. Where had the red panda gone, seriously? It made no sense.

She lifted her gaze as the mother and daughter walked out to Central and waited at the Q-Line stop. The city’s free trolley made limited trips off the main drag downtown, and the new shipping container center was one of them.

As the trolley came to a stop in front of them, motion in the girl’s backpack drew Reena’s attention. The flap opened up and the red panda popped its head out.

“Oh, no.”

Reena whirled on her heel and ran back outside to get her scooter.

The girl had bought the red panda.

Now she was going to have to chase after the trolley. That meant they would be going downtown. Reena didn’t even want to think about the problems being downtown would cause.

She leaped on her scooter, started the engine, and took off after the trolley. She leaped off the curb and hit the street, pushing the engine to its limit. She could manage in traffic for a little ways. Not more than two miles probably.

Her mind ticked away on the Q-Line stops. She’d been looking it up the other day for a party she’d been planning. Where did it go after it left East Central? Did it go back downtown?

Reena winced as a truck passed her too fast. She held her ground and stayed on the wood-paneled trolley’s tail.

She could see the map in her mind. It left East Central and went—back to Douglas, right? But did it take Washington?

“Oh, please let it take Washington!”

Reena steadied her scooter and reached for the visor she kept on top of her helmet. She lowered it over her eyes and tapped the boot-up button on the arm.

A HUD screen filled with data over her left eye.

She and Jim had designed it a few months back as part of a research project, trying to translate the functionality of the Peregrine wrist watches into a visor. It hadn’t turned out nearly as practical as they’d hoped, but she’d kept the prototype.

“ROM, I need a hand.”

The screen flashed a smiley face emoji at her.

Strictly speaking, ROM was the artificial interface Peregrine Agents used on their cases. It wasn’t for personal use. But Jim had loaded some of ROM’s programming into the visor as a test, and Reena simply hadn’t removed it yet.

“Give me the readout of the Wichita Q-Line trolley route. I need where it is and where it’s going.” She peered through the visor text to the trolley’s service number. “Trolley number seven.”

ROM flashed a thumbs up emoji at her and in moments listed out a detailed route, including stops.

Trolley 7 was an express route, which made a run between Central and Volutsia and didn’t stop until it hit Douglas and Washington.

“Washington!” Reena nearly jumped before she remembered she was on an electric scooter flying down Central at top speed.

An answer to prayer, that’s what that was.

Because to get to Douglas and Washington, they would pass Second and Washington. And Second and Washington was where she could get some backup.

“ROM, I need you to send a text.” Reena corrected her angle to get around a pothole. “Mica Douglas.”

ROM flashed a question mark.

“Need help now,” Reena dictated with a smirk. “Hope you brought your helmet to work.”

As her scooter whirred along the road, keeping the trolley in sight, Reena grinned when the visor screen flashed again with a line of text from her best friend.

“Don’t I always?”