Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents the sequel to the critically acclaimed Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, a brilliant sci-fi romp with Cuban influence. Among many other challenges, Sal and Gabi have to try to make everything right with our world when there is a rogue Gabi from another universe running loose. Sal Vidon doesn't want to live a Mami-free life. Pulling different versions of his mother from other universes is how he copes with missing his own, who died years ago. But Sal's father, a calamity physicist, is trying to shut down all the wormholes Sal creates, because Papi thinks they are eroding the very fabric of our world. All of Papi's efforts are in vain, however, because a Gabi from another universe has gone rogue and is popping up all over the place, seeking revenge for the fact that her world has been destroyed. While Sal and Gabi work together to keep both Papi and Rogue Gabi under control, they also have to solve the mystery of Yasmany, who has gone missing...

How did a raw chicken get inside Yasmany's locker? When Sal Vidon meets Gabi Real for the first time, it isn't under the best of circumstances. Sal is in the principal's office for the third time in three days, and it's still the first week of school. Gabi, student council president and editor of the school paper, is there to support her friend Yasmany, who just picked a fight with Sal. She is determined to prove that somehow, Sal planted a raw chicken in Yasmany's locker, even though nobody saw him do it and the bloody poultry has since mysteriously disappeared. Sal prides himself on being an excellent magician, but for this sleight of hand, he relied on a talent no one would guess . . . except maybe Gabi, whose sharp eyes never miss a trick. When Gabi learns that he's capable of conjuring things much bigger than a chicken—including his dead mother—and she takes it all in stride, Sal knows that she is someone he can work with. There's only one slight problem: their manipulation...

Assimilation is founded on surrender. You can be killed, exiled, ostracized, imprisoned, or gagged against your will, but to be assimilated, first you must be broken. And despite the relentless canon of monomyths meant to assuage us, we’re all broken. That’s the main thing human society is for: to make you say “no más.” And then “whatever you say.” But sometimes you unsurrender. Sometimes you’re a concert pianist who defies death by uploading your soul into your piano. Sometimes you draw your mother’s ghost out of the bullet hole in the wall where she was executed. Look, it’s your fault that a horn started growing out of the center of your forehead, but maybe you can still make things right. And when you can’t--when you’re too weak to end the affair, too much in love to be moral--well, there are always other timelimes, where you can ask all those better versions of yourself to help you do the right thing. Of course, they’re all just as flawed and horny as you are. Poignant by way of funny, philosophical by way of grotesque, Hernandez’s stories are hardly a guide to anything, unless you’re a panda-breeder looking for tips or a border patroller trying to figure out how to process undocumented visitors from another galaxy. Instead, they’re ebos, using hair and blood and spit and rum to push back against assimilation. Each story is a prayer for self-sovereignty.