Wood Sprites

20: Complications

Louise thought she’d walked into the wrong room on Monday. She jerked to a halt, momentarily disoriented. She didn’t recognize the room, but they had just been at their locker, so they had to be on the fifth-grade floor. She yawned deeply, sure that it was the lack of sleep that was making it hard to think. They’d stayed up every night since last Tuesday, playing with the magic generator and planning the two robberies.

Jillian thumped into her back. “Ow! Lou! Why’d you stop?”

Louise rocked back so she could check the number over the doorway. Yes, it was their classroom. All the art hung on the walls had been taken down, the desks had been rearranged, and there was something odd about the windows that she couldn’t put a finger on. What’s more, no one was in the room, despite the fact that the hall was crowded.

Jillian didn’t notice the changes; she was focused on her tablet. She stepped around Louise and continued walking to where their seats used to be. “We should get something like a floor safe that’s fireproof. . and. . and put it in a cardboard box labeled ‘time capsule, do not open until 2050’ and put it into our closet. We could even draw a safe on the outside of the box. Or we can get something like this.”

Jillian held up her tablet to show a bullet-shaped container made by the Smithsonian that had the words “Time Capsule” printed in large blue letters on it. There was a plaque to mark where the tube was buried.

“What if Mom and Dad make us bury it?”

Jillian made a face as she thought about it a moment. “That might work.”

“How would you feel if your parents told you that they’d buried you in the backyard for twenty years? It would be worse than that cabbage-patch story Grandma Mayer used to tell us.”

“Better than Nana.” She fell into their grandmother’s thick Jamaican accent. “We got you at Macy’s. It was a half-off sale; that’s why we got two.”

“Forget about it. No burying the babies,” Louise stated firmly. “It’s just creepy.”

Jillian blew a raspberry, reached where her desk should be, and stopped in surprise. “Where’s my desk?”

“Over here.” Louise pointed to the desk beside her. The powers that be had decided that fifth-graders were all now big kids and had put desks for high school students in the room at the beginning of the year. After five minutes with their feet dangling, the twins had demanded that they be given desks for little kids. “Or over there.”

“No. No. We sit together.” Jillian picked up the other small desk and moved it beside Louise. “Where is everyone?”

It was weird that they were the only ones in the room. Now that she thought about it, all the hallways had been crowded as they climbed the stairs. “I think they’re too scared to come into the rooms.”

“Really?”

The twins had rushed to the classroom to get away from the noisy crowd. It seemed very wrong, though, that they were more scared of the other kids than a bomb. Maybe because they realized the odds for an ugly encounter with peers was a million times more likely than a second bomb.

Claudia peered timidly into the room, saw that they rearranging the desk and hurried in. Normally she sat at the head of the first row but she claimed the desk beside Louise. “Did you hear? There’s elves at the Waldorf Astoria!”

“Really?” the twins both shouted. “Which ones?”

Claudia winced. “I can’t say the name. They only gave the Elvish name, and it was really long. It’s the female with really white hair and the blue triangle thing on her forehead.”

“Saetato-fohaili-ba-taeli?” the twins cried.

“Um, maybe,” Claudia said.

It was an elf, only not one of the twins’ favorites. The female’s English name was Sparrow, the correct translation being Lifted Sparrow by Wind. The twins had called the character based on her “Jerked” but never had a reason to mention that in any of their videos, so she remained nameless to their fans. Sparrow was the viceroy’s husepavua, which literally meant “loaned voice,” so the twins had her carry around a megaphone, through which she shouted any order that Windwolf gave her. The few times the twins had raided EIA records, Sparrow seemed to act as an ambassador, meeting with Director Maynard and Pittsburgh city officials in Windwolf’s place. Normally if there was video of some Elfhome diplomatic event, the cameras would stay focused on Windwolf. Which wasn’t all that surprising — he was the viceroy, looked like a teen idol and had a rabid fan following of girls from ages nine through ninety.

If only it had been Windwolf instead of Sparrow. However, with madmen blowing up buildings, Louise was glad the viceroy was still safe on Elfhome.

Louise squeaked in realization that it was the worst possible time for the elves to venture to New York City. “Why on Earth is she here? Now?”

Claudia blinked in surprise. “You haven’t heard? There’s this really awesome exhibit of Elvish artifacts found all over the world. It’s coming to New York in a few days. The UN decided that since humans have broken part of the treaty by logging the quarantine zone, the elves could reclaim any part of the exhibit that is culturally important to them.”

“What?” Louise and Jillian both cried. They hadn’t planned for elves seeing the exhibit. Sparrow would know Dufae’s box was a chest and that it could be opened. At least the female elf couldn’t open it, not on Earth without magic, and not on Elfhome without the key phrase to the spell lock.

“The elves will probably lie and claim everything in the exhibit.” Elle hovered at the door for a minute, trying not to look scared and failing. Then with a deep breath, she marched across the room to the twins. She gave Jillian an odd measuring look, like she wanted something from Jillian but knew she couldn’t get it from her, and then hugged Louise tightly.

Louise squeaked in surprise and then realized that Elle was trembling. The girl was really, really scared. Taking pity on Elle, Louise hugged her back. “There, there.” She repeated the nonsense her father always said at times like this. She understood now why; what the hell was she supposed to say? It was the first time Louise had ever hugged anyone outside her family. Elle seemed to be all fragile bones under her porcelain white skin. She smelled totally different than Jillian; if pink had a scent, Elle was delicately sprinkled with it.

Jillian gave Louise a confused look for hugging Elle. “No, they’re elves. They won’t lie; it’s shameful to them to be deceitful. It goes against their sense of honor. They wouldn’t say something was culturally important if it wasn’t.”

Which was the twins’ only comfort in the face of the news.

“Bad form?” Elle quoted Peter Pan’s criticism of Hook when he cheated. “There will always be villains that break the rules. Only children are naïve enough to believe that.”

“Honor isn’t about other people, it’s about what you want to be,” Louise said. “A hero does the good and noble thing. The villain allows fear or envy or selfishness to let him ignore what is right. If you can recognize the difference, then you’re choosing to be one or the other. Which do you want to be? The villain or the hero?”

“Oh!” Claudia cried as she remembered something else. “And Sae-Saetoto. .”

“Sparrow.” Jillian saved Claudia from butchering the rest of the female’s name. Really, how much harder was Saetato than Claudia?

“Sparrow brought sekasha with her. Five of them!”

The twins squealed in excitement. “Which ones? Which ones?”

“Wraith Arrow.” Claudia ticked names off on her fingers. “Skybolt. Zephyr Blade. The blue-haired one.”

“Stormsong?” The twins squealed for one of their favorites. Apparently at some point, Stormsong had had a stalker with an artist’s eye. The twins had found hauntingly beautiful pictures of Stormsong doing unlikely things like skateboarding. The photographs had been on an abandoned website; it wasn’t clear if the stalker had died of old age or come to a violent end for pissing off the female warrior elf.

“I think Killing Frost,” Claudia continued. “Or it could have been Tempest Knife. You know a lot of them look like twins.”

“They’re not twins,” Louise said. The ninjas had attempted to build family trees for the elves in Pittsburgh and were dismayed to discover that while the elves were all part of the Wind Clan, not one was actually related to another. None of Windwolf’s bodyguards were even cousins to one another. But Louise had to admit that they did look like brothers. The Wind Clan sekasha were tall, strongly built without being muscle-bound, black-haired, blue-eyed, and model handsome. They were also all the same exact height except for the blue-haired Stormsong and the youngest of the sekasha, Louise’s personal favorite, Pony.

Jillian was already checking her tablet for news stories. “Of course they don’t name the bodyguards. Come on. Pictures. Pictures. Yes!”

Louise took out her tablet as Jillian linked the story. The elves had been photographed at the train station, unloading. There was something surreal about seeing them up against the familiar landscape of New York City. “That’s Bladebite, not Skybolt, and Tempest Knife.”

“How can you tell?” Claudia asked.

Louise frowned at the male, trying to pinpoint the differences. “Bladebite is wider across the shoulders. His features are squarer. He keeps his hair shorter, so the beads the sekasha braid into their hair are more noticeable.”

“What are the beads for?” Elle sounded honestly curious, not like before, when she didn’t expect them to know and thought she was setting up a trap.

The twins glanced at each other. They’d never been able to find the answer until they got hold of the codex. How safe was it to explain to their classmate information that they shouldn’t have?

“They’re like batteries,” Jillian decided to tell them. “The beads store magic so that the sekasha can trigger the protective spells tattooed on their arms in areas where there is little or no magic. It only buys them a minute or two of time on Earth, but presumably they’d kill their attacker in that time.”

“Oh, so cool!” Claudia bounced. “We should go see them!”

“What?” the twins both cried.

“Wouldn’t it be awesome to meet a sekasha? I think they’re totally the coolest elves. Sword Strike is my favorite; he’s so dreamy!” Claudia cried and dropped her voice to say the catchphrase of the captain of the queen’s guards. “Sonai Domi.” She sighed deeply. “It’s so cool when he says that. You can tell that he loves her so much.”

“What does ‘sonai domi’ mean?” Elle asked. “And are they really lovers? Or did you make that all up?”

Okay, Elle was totally freaking Louise out. Elle sounded like she really wanted the answer to be “Yes, they’re in love.” Elle had to be a fan of the videos.

“We think they are.” Louise linked to their home computer and found the clip she wanted. “Normally we grab everything we can of a person talking and then build a phonetics library using their voice. After we write the script, we record Jillian reading it to get the timing and inflection that we want. We merge that with the right voice for the character to get natural sounding dialogue.”

“But the real sekasha almost never talk,” Jillian grumbled.

They had run hundreds of hours of video through an application that watched for lip movement, and only uncovered a handful of spoken words, most of them on the order of “yes” and “no.” The bodyguards stood in the background, faces set, silently vigilant.

The sekasha were, however, so omnipresent that the twins felt that they had to have at least one active character who was part of the holy warrior caste. Finally they found a voice sample. In a Pittsburgh television station’s news archive, they unearthed a video taken during the signing of the peace treaty between the humans and the elves. In a total of twenty-seven frames, Sword Strike’s expression changed to utter tenderness as he gazed down at his queen and murmured the two words in a deep, rich rumble. It felt extraordinary to witness the sudden transformation, as if they had accidently seen into the male’s soul.

Louise played the clip, first at normal speed, and then in slow motion.

“Wow,” Elle whispered. “They’re into each other.”

Louise broke the phrase down. “The ninjas have translated sonai to ‘kind’ and domi as ‘the female I’m beholden to.’ Literally it would mean ‘my kind lady,’ but we ran across some other places where elves used sonai and a more correct translation seems to be ‘have mercy.’ We’re fairly sure at this moment Sword Strike isn’t saying ‘my kind lady’ but ‘please don’t kick their butt.’ See, she starts off looking annoyed, and then blushes, and then looks a little embarrassed. It’s what started the whole ‘blast them all’ running joke.”

Claudia and Elle both giggled, which was good.

Jillian wasn’t completely happy that Louise was admitting that they weren’t perfect. She gave Louise a dark look, but explained the rest of their reasoning. “We wanted to use him as a character after that but no one ever caught him talking on video again, so we couldn’t get a full phonetic sampling. We couldn’t find any human voice that we liked in the free archives, so we decided we’d use the undoctored sound bite as his automatic response to anything going on.”

“It works well,” Elle said.

Claudia bounced again. “So, we can go see the elves. Right?”

Louise was glad that Elle seemed slightly horrified by the question as well.

“Going to see them would be bad.” Giselle came into the room and joined the conversation without so much as saying good morning. “The Jello Shots are going nuts. Some of them are pissed that Queen Soulful Ember and Sword Strike didn’t come to Earth, and the others are mad that Wraith Arrow isn’t here with Prince Yardstick because they ship the two together.”

“What?” Louise didn’t understand what “ship” meant. It sounded like they were two dolls in one package, but that didn’t make sense.

Giselle misunderstood the question. “Yeah, I know. Anyhow, all of the Jello Shots are talking about coming to see the elves. Not just the Jello Shots in New York City. California. Japan. England. China.”

They had fans in China?

“And Earth for Humans is all worked up, too,” Elle added. “It’s the only reason my mom sent me to school. She said that with elves in New York City, no one is going to even think about the undamaged art at the gallery.”

Louise had never considered the fact that the terrorists’ original goal had gone undamaged and thus remained a target. She glanced toward the window. Roycroft had been killed in a shoot-out in upstate New York, but the police were saying that what they recovered indicated that he was working in a terrorist cell with at least two other people. Earth for Humans claimed that Roycroft had gone rogue and that they had no knowledge of who he was working with, or of the bomb. No wonder Elle was scared. But when Louise weighed all the factors, what scared Louise more was that the elves might take Dufae’s box back to Elfhome before the twins could get their hands on a nactka.

The rest of the day was devoted to getting caught up on the four days of school they’d missed. While the other kids were scrambling to learn material that would be on the upcoming state achievement tests, the twins multitasked between working on the class play and tracking the museum’s suddenly frantic level of e-mails. Dufae’s box was in France, and France was balking at sending its three treasures. Like Elle, they were worried that the elves would simply claim all the items on exhibit to be culturally important and ask for everything to be returned to them.

France obviously didn’t care about the box, because it rarely made an appearance in their side of the conversation. Their focus was on a crown worth a king’s ransom. Because it bore a resemblance to the Grand Duchess Vladimir tiara, the crown was believed to be the inspiration of the Russian court jeweler Bolin. A stunning piece of fifteen intertwined diamond-encrusted circles with fifteen flame sapphires, which could have only come from Elfhome. In addition, there was Elvish inscribed on the inside (although the twins couldn’t find a translation of the Elvish online). The history of the piece vanished during the Russian Revolution, along with the tiara. Somehow it was found by the Nazis and recovered after the Second World War by the French. France’s claim on the crown was nebulous since it had originally belonged to Imperial Russia, and the equally fabulous copy was part of the British Crown Jewels by some odd chain of bloodlines and events. The French clearly wanted to state “finder’s keepers” without being completely politically rude. They pointed out that unless Queen Soulful Ember or her father, King Ashfall, had lost it while sightseeing on Earth, the only way it could be in France was that the elves had sold it at some point to humans.

Of course, this circled back to the point of the exhibit, which was that the elves used to be frequent visitors to Earth, all the while keeping humans ignorant of Elfhome’s existence.

Because the elves were on Earth and the exhibit opened in two weeks, the curators of AMNH were in a frenzy to get the dispute settled as quickly as possible. In so many words, they pointed out that crowds came to see sparkly things like gold and gems, and that children would not be impressed by the carved wood and rich fabrics that made up much of the exhibit. France wanted a promise that the United States wouldn’t give the crown to the elves, but since the United Nations were debating the issue, the AMNH would have to obey the world’s decision.

“I could just scream,” Louise whispered to Jillian. “None of it is really theirs in the first place. Just being little pigs about the matter.”

Jillian nodded glumly. “Here comes Mr. Kessler. You should probably at least pretend to pay attention to class.”

Louise groaned quietly and closed up the web browser. Mr. Kessler paused at the doorway, obviously disoriented by the changes to their classroom. He eyed the new windows, the bare walls, and the desks rearranged by Miss Hamilton in an attempt to distract her students from the ruin of the building across the street. He spotted Louise and headed toward her.

What did he want? Louise sunk lower in her chair, wishing she could hide under her desk.

“Twin — Louise. Here.” He set a magic generator down on her desk.

Louise blinked at it, confused by its presence. “Where — where did you get that?”

Mr. Kessler opened his mouth, caught himself before saying something cutting, and forced out a level, “I made it. Since I dropped your original — by accident — I ran your program a second time. And I tried it out. I have no idea what you think this does, but at least it doesn’t burst into flames when you plug it into a 220 outlet.”

Louise gathered it up, wanting to hide it so no one else would have the chance to examine it closely. “Thank you. Can I put it in my locker to keep it safe?”

Mr. Kessler flicked his hand toward the door and started for the teacher’s desk.

Louise hurried to their locker and stuffed it into Tesla’s storage compartment. What could they tell Mr. Kessler? Did they have to tell him anything? He seemed not to really care what the generator did, which was weird. Why would he even give it to her until he knew what it did? She was glad he had, but it seemed stupid of him.

“Seamus!” Mr. Howe barked in his classroom across the hall. “Sit!”

Oh. Yes. Mr. Howe had told Mr. Kessler not to bully the twins. Apparently Mr. Kessler was worried that breaking the fake generator would be considered being intentionally mean to Louise. He was making sure that everything was good before the joint stagecraft class, where Louise would have to give Mr. Howe a report of her progress or lack thereof. Eek! They hadn’t made a second fake generator! They’d just assumed that Mr. Kessler would report the first one smashed and that would be the end of it. Oh, how could they be so stupid? Of course, one way or another, they’d have to produce an unsmashed fake generator because they’d said it was necessary to put on the play! If she took the magic generator upstairs during stagecraft, Mr. Howe would insist it be stored with the rest of the play equipment — which was the whole point of having the fake in the first place. She needed a fake, and she needed it to be able to do something demonstrable.

What could it do?

She leaned against the cool metal of her locker, thinking. Something to do with the play that she had overlooked but would seem vital. The holographic projectors were to deal with the mermaids. What else was Peter Pan canon? Pixie dust? No, they were going to go with just glitter, and that was the most intelligent method. Wait — Tinker Bell! Traditionally the fairy was represented just by a pin spotlight and a shimmer of bells as the character spoke. The twins were planning to do a traditional Tinker Bell, but they could do it bigger.

She hurried back to her desk. Mr. Kessler glanced at her as she came in but didn’t stop his lecture on spreadsheets. She quickly checked his class schedule for the next few periods. As she’d hoped, he was floating from class to class today, spending the next four periods on the lower floors. It’d be unlikely he’d climb the eight flights up to the art rooms.

She then quickly checked a run time on a hybrid projector. Only three hours. Good. It gave her forty minutes to spare. If there was a teacher mode on the printer, then she should actually be able to load the program remotely. (Since the school was filled with gifted students, it really should have had a beefier security system. She and Jillian had hacked in as first-graders and set up a back door that no one had seemed to notice in the last five years.)

She winced at the printer’s log that showed who accessed the printer and copies of the programs they ran. Judging from the few times that the printer had been used, Mr. Kessler really did see the printer as “his.” In the last month, she and Mr. Kessler were the only ones using it. It felt wrong to leave any evidence of the magic generator anywhere in the school system, so she changed the log, swapping out the magic-generator program with the hybrid projector.

Twenty-three minutes later, she started the print job. Once the printer was finished, she would delete out all evidence that she — or rather Mr. Kessler — printed anything new. The only hard thing left was getting the hybrid projector off the 3D printer and into storage with the other play items. Since the entire class saw Mr. Kessler hand her the magic generator, she had fourteen witnesses that she had to go to the art room.

The end-of-period bell rang, and she followed Mr. Kessler out the door and watched him head to the stairs. His next class was with the second-graders, two flights down, but he did have time to run upstairs and back.

“Go down. Go down,” she whispered.

He paused at the stairs, checked his watch, and trotted downwards.

“Oh, thank God.” She collapsed against the wall with relief.

Jillian was grinning hugely.

“What?” Louise asked.

“We’ve got a second generator!” Jillian whispered. “It means we both can go to the museum.”

Louise gasped. She hadn’t even considered that side of things. “But it’s all useless if France doesn’t send the box.”

“They’ll send it.” Jillian’s grin didn’t waver. “Even if we have to get tricky about it.”

A full agonizing ten days later, the EIA talked France into sending just the box. Suddenly they had seventy-two hours to be ready to rob a world-famous museum.