Alien in the Family

“Oh, and we tell the humans from the A-Cs by the heartbeats. And A-Cs can’t lie to me, either. So, yeah, humans down there, not A-Cs. Confused humans who haven’t spoken to you, ever. Who also, let me mention, didn’t send any food up to you.”
    “Stop eating or drinking,” I barked. “Lorraine and Claudia, full medical scans on everybody, right now.”
    Reader opened his phone and made another call while the girls leaped into action. They scanned Martini, Christopher, me, Gower, and Chuckie first, then themselves and the rest of the team. “Our telephony team’s on the way. More medical’s coming, too,” Reader told me. “Along with the rest of our supplies. And a ton of adrenaline. That we’ll want to keep under lock and key.”
    He didn’t need to tell me. Martini’s empathic blocks and synapses burned out under too much stress and activity. Sleep was a regenerative, and so were some medical procedures, but he routinely reached a point where he had to go into an isolation chamber, and if he didn’t get into one, he had to have adrenaline or die. Point of fact, I had to slam a huge hypodermic that resembled a harpoon far more than a sewing needle into his hearts. It was horrible, but it was a better option than letting him die. We’d had plenty of enemies use his adrenaline dependency against him, particularly during Operation Drug Addict, so there was no reason to think this time would be any different.
    The girls were done. “Nobody has anything wrong that we can tell,” Lorraine said with relief.
    I looked at the table. “What, if anything, wasn’t eaten by someone on the team?”
    We all examined the offerings. “That,” Chuckie pointed to a dish near the center. “I have no idea what it is, by the way, which is why I didn’t touch it. But it’s undisturbed from how it was when it arrived, so no one else had any either.”
    Reader and I looked at it. “No clue.”
    “Me either, girlfriend. Yo, Tim, flyboys, need you for a minute.” The rest of the humans came over. Reader pointed. “Don’t eat it or taste it, but do you have any idea of what it is?”
    They all shook their heads. “Looks gross,” Jerry said.
    “Sort of like boiled okra,” Joe offered.
    “Only not like my mamma ever made,” Randy added.
    All the A-Cs were staring at it. “Familiar?” I asked Martini.
    “No. I’m with the others, that looks disgusting.”
    I reached out and took the alien-detector out of Jerry’s hand and held it toward the icky foodstuff. It glowed red.
    “Sentient food? I mean, after it’s been cooked?”
    “They don’t find sentience,” Chuckie said. “They find something alien to Earth.”
    “Why the color spectrum, then?”
    “Because we have DNA samples of what pure A-Cs and hybrid A-Cs are made of. So we can spot them. You know, so we know who the friendlies are?” Chuckie looked over to Martini. “Red means alien we don’t know about.”
    Martini nodded. “That’s why the necklace and the tracker showed red. They’re metals from our home world, but not metals that are in our DNA. Baby, run it over everything else.”
    I did. Only the one dish glowed red. Tim checked out the minibar and all the stuff in the refrigerator—all clean. Something in my brain kicked. “You said the front desk clerk thought she’d given Chuckie’s food order to the Catering department’s runner, right?”
    “Yes,” Christopher confirmed. “And we’re not quite as stupid as you always seem to think. Already checked out every person in the Catering department. No one’s missing, no one’s extra. Everyone who’s supposed to be here today is, and no one has a day off today, either.”
    “So we have an extra body. That the front desk clerk thought was someone she knew.”
    “Right.” Christopher shrugged. “No idea of what to do about it, though.”
    I hated to say this in front of Chuckie. “Okay, then the A-C we’re looking for is an imageer.”
    “Come again?” Christopher sounded insulted. “What makes you say that?”
    “Because you don’t have shapeshifters.” I looked around. Everyone else looked blank too. I had no idea why. It seemed obvious.
    A-Cs with imageering talent were able to manipulate images, which was how the Imageering side of the Centaurion house kept the regular humans from realizing parasitic jellyfish things had splatted onto a human and turned said human into an alien superbeing monster.
    In addition to manipulation, an imageer who’d touched