Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion

By K. Tempest Bradford

Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion is a backyard adventure-mystery by debut children’s author K. Tempest Bradford, perfect for fans of Clean Getaway, The Last Last Day of Summer, and Sideways School.

Eleven-year-old Ruby is a Black girl who loves studying insects and would do just about anything to be an entomologist, much to the grossed-out dismay of her Gramma. Ruby knows everything there is to know about insects so when she finds the weirdest bug she’s ever seen in her front yard, she makes sure no one is looking and captures it for further study.

But then Ruby realizes that the creature isn't just a regular bug. And it has promptly burned a hole through her window and disappeared. Soon, random things around the neighborhood go missing, and no one's heard from the old lady down the street for a week. Ruby and her friends will have to recover the strange bug before the feds do.

Ruby is the science hero we’ve all been waiting for!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9780374388805

K. Tempest Bradford

K. Tempest Bradford is a science fiction and fantasy writer, writing instructor, media critic, reviewer, and podcaster. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines. She’s the host of ORIGINality, a podcast about the roots of creative genius. Her media criticism and reviews can be found on NPR, io9, and in books about Time Lords. When not writing, she teaches classes on writing inclusive fiction through LitReactor and WritingtheOther.com. Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion is her children’s debut.

Book preview

CHAPTER

ONE

Ruby loved bugs. She loved the cool-looking ones and the creepy ones and the pretty ones and the huge ones. The ones with six legs and eight legs and a thousand legs and no legs. She loved looking at them and talking about them and learning about them and picking them up. That last one was usually what got her in trouble.

Take that nasty thing outside! Gramma would say (after she was done screaming in fright) when she found them in the Tupperware or the mason jars hidden under Ruby’s bed or in the closet. Gramma had a No Tolerance policy when it came to bugs. Any sign of an ant in the bedroom, a housefly in the kitchen, spiders in the basement, or stink bugs on the windowsills, and she would hunt them down with no mercy, her homemade bug-killing juice in an old spray bottle in one hand and sometimes a mallet in the other.

So on that late-September afternoon when Ruby spotted the weirdest bug she’d ever seen in her front yard, she made sure no one sitting on their porch or walking down the street was looking. Then she scooped up the bug with a trowel and dropped it into one of the mason jars she kept hidden under the porch for just this sort of thing.

Slipping into the house by the side door so she wouldn’t have to go past the TV room where Gramma was watching her stories, Ruby went upstairs (without thundering like an elephant) and dashed into her room. Here she had time to study the weird bug up close. It didn’t look like any of the species she’d ever seen before. It was a dull red color and had six legs (so not a spider), big green eyes like a fly (but no wings), and a pinchy mouth like an ant (except no segments). She figured she should look it up to make sure it wasn’t dangerous like those emerald ash borer beetles she found infesting the trees around the house. Her gramma was happy she’d been out there messin’ with them bugs that day.

No matter what key words she put into her school tablet’s search engine, the results didn’t show anything even close to what was in front of her. Her daddy had given her a big book for identifying insects, arthropods, and other bugs, with pictures of almost every known tiny creature with four or more legs discovered around the world. After a half hour of flipping through it, she still hadn’t found anything.

What are you? she asked it. The bug didn’t answer.

Finally, she took a couple of pictures of it with the tablet and logged in to the secret Twitter account her parents didn’t know she had. Anyone seen an insect like this before? she typed, then uploaded the pictures. She hit tweet, looked up from the tablet, and saw that the mason jar was empty.

Uh…

The top was still screwed on tight.

But how…?

She picked up the jar and found a hole—a perfectly circular hole—in the side.

What?

A noise at the window made her look over. There was the weird bug, and it was using its front legs to burn a hole through the mesh screen.

WHAT!

It looked back at her, then leaped through the hole and outside. Ruby tore off down the stairs—How many times have I told you not to run around this house like an elephant!—and ran outside, but she saw no sign of the green-eyed, six-legged, glass-cutting, metal-burning bug.

Half an hour later, Ruby still hadn’t found it and was sitting on the front porch trying to figure out how she was going to explain the hole in her window screen. Out of nowhere three black sedans came zooming down the street, pulled up in front of the house, and a bunch of white men in suits got out. This was never, ever a good thing, even in a safe neighborhood like hers.

Grammaaaaaaaaa! she shouted as she ran inside.

What, girl, what is it? Gramma asked, unconcerned until she saw the men on her porch. Her body went stiff and her expression turned stony. Can I help you?

One of the white men, with hair cut so short he was almost bald, stepped up to the door.

Ma’am, I’m Agent Gerrold. He flashed a badge too fast to show what he was an agent of, exactly. We’re looking for… He checked his smartphone, looked at Gramma over his dark glasses, then down to Ruby. Are you @LilEntomologist on Twitter?

She’s only eleven, Gramma said. She ain’t allowed on Twitter yet.

Agent Gerrold kept staring at Ruby.

Yeah, Ruby admitted in a mumbly voice. She could already feel the whuppin’ she was gonna get for creating another secret account.

Where is this? He turned his screen to show the picture of the bug she’d tweeted earlier.

"What in h—! What is that?" Gramma said in a very familiar-to-Ruby tone.

I don’t know where it is, she said. It escaped after I posted that.

Escaped where? Gramma shrieked. Is that thing somewhere in my house?!

Ruby had a feeling she wasn’t gonna be able to sit for a month. No, Gramma! It ate through the screen and escaped out the window! That was not the thing to say to make her calm down.

Ate through? Gramma looked like she was gonna drop to the floor right then.

Ma’am. The agent stepped forward like he was fixing to catch her, then stepped back when she shot a look at him. Ma’am, please stay calm. The specimen won’t hurt you.

The specimen? Gramma and Ruby said at the same time.

"It’s a Reduvius Zelus longipes bug from the Amazonian rain forest. They don’t attack humans. They only use their powerful saliva to kill the other insects they eat and to escape from danger."

So it’s going to eat up my house?

No, ma’am. It only wanted to escape. It probably came in the house looking for warmth. They’re not used to our climate. They’re also skittish and don’t like human contact, so it likely ran away from the structure.

The agent was talking in a calm and authoritative tone. Ruby recognized it from her mama, who used that voice on patients who were freaked out about going to the dentist. It was calming Gramma down, so Ruby didn’t tell him that she knew he was talking nonsense. Reduvius Zelus longipes was the scientific name for a type of assassin bug. She’d read all about those. That thing she caught earlier didn’t look anything like any assassin bug she’d ever seen a picture of.

Plus, who sent out three cars full of white men in suits to track down an assassin bug?

The species is invasive and doesn’t have natural predators here. To be safe, we’re going to search the whole area and we need you to stay inside.

Gramma was calming down and starting to be skeptical again. Over one bug from the Amazon?

They kill bees, ma’am, the agent said very seriously. You know what will happen if the bees die.

That made Gramma gasp. Everyone in this house knew the importance of bees, thanks to Ruby.

I understand, Gramma said, pulled her granddaughter inside, and closed the door.

CHAPTER

TWO

Ruby and Gramma watched the G-men (as Gramma kept calling them) from the windows as they searched the neighborhood. Their house was near the corner, so from upstairs Ruby could track them pretty far down the block and on the cross street. They were using fancy equipment—far too fancy for finding a bug. Something else must be going on, but what?

She grabbed her tablet to see if anyone had responded to her tweet. No one had. In fact, the tweet was gone from her account. And before she had a chance to be mad about that, the tablet flashed a message that it was resetting to factory defaults.

No, wait! she yelled like it would do any good. It didn’t. She didn’t even have time to save the photos from the gallery. In a few seconds the tablet was rebooting, the little android’s guts spinning and spinning on the screen.

The school had the ability to trigger a factory reset at any time, but they only bothered to do that when a tablet was stolen. Ruby peered out the window at the men, frowning. This was their fault. Somehow, they’d gotten into her Twitter account and her tablet and erased the evidence of the strange bug. No way this was some common assassin bug. Something big was going on.

The tablet would be useless for a while, so she turned on her xCUBE game console to see if any of her friends were on and chatting. Her cousin Hollie and friends Brandon and Alberto were in a voice chat room for the game Neon Crisis Avengers. When she entered, Ruby saw that only Alberto was playing—the other two were watching and talking.

… they’re parked in front of Ruby’s house. You think she’s in trouble? she heard Brandon say once she got in. He lived down the block and was always ready for someone else to be in trouble because then it wouldn’t just be him.

No, I’m not! she said defiantly.

But I bet you know what’s going on, her cousin Hollie said. Where did all these white people come from?

I dunno. They said they’re with the government. They came looking for that bug I tweeted about.

You’re back on Twitter? Hollie now sounded all adult and fake disappointed.

You’re definitely gonna get in trouble, Brandon sang. Such a brat.

Only if my parents find out.

And they certainly will, Hollie said.

Brandon sucked his teeth. Not you acting like you’re not gonna be the one to tell them.

I would never! Hollie said. Ruby’s my bestie, I wouldn’t get her in trouble on purpose. I’m just concerned. Hollie was only a year older than Ruby but she acted like she was grown. The way she said concerned sounded just like her mom, Ruby’s aunt Peggy.

"As long as everyone keeps quiet there’s no need for concern. Ruby mimicked Hollie, giggling. Anyway, those government men are looking for the weird bug because they say it’s dangerous to the

Reviews for Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ruby is a self motivated proto-entomologist who finds a very strange bug and in posting a picture on Twitter - which she has been forbidden to use, causes herself, her family, her friends, and her neighbors various difficulties and excitement. Not to mention government agents. Meanwhile Ruby's science teacher is trying to convince her to be less ambitious in her science project about bees. Ruby uses scientific methods to evaluate what she has observed - and the conclusions are both accurate and influenced by conspiracy theories.

[ladycato · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this work for Norton Award consideration, and I found it to be a fun read! Though it felt a bit slow to get going, I really loved Ruby, her family, and the tight-knit neighborhood children. There was a wonderful sense of community. The interstellar invasion delivered some nice surprises in the end, too.