Wood Sprites

36: Mischief Of Mice

“What we need are mice,” Jillian thud-thunked the baseball against the floor and vanity instead of helping Louise. “A whole bunch of mice. A herd? A flock? Whatever they call a lot of mice.”

“Huh?” Louise wasn’t sure she had heard her twin correctly. It was proving harder than she thought to raid Ming’s many bank accounts. Most of his liquid capital was well hidden in offshore accounts. She had to track all large transfers of cash and then determine who actually owned the destination company. Once she found the accounts, however, it was fairly simple to trigger another transfer to one of theirs. She bounced the money between shell companies, like a pea under a set of cups, and then dropped it into one of their super-secret accounts.

“A mischief of mice,” Nikola answered Jillian’s question, head cocked in confusion. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s so cool.” Jillian laughed evilly. “And utterly perfect. Then what we need is a mischief of mice. Robotic mice. Exploding robotic mice. A couple hundred of them. Maybe several thousand.”

Louise sighed out her anger. Dovetail and the others had already finished moving all the furniture into Lain’s old bedroom. Luckily the chaos that they were creating had distracted Anna along with the elves. Louise could feel that they were running out of time. Still, she couldn’t insist on Jillian focusing on looting Ming’s finances because it would make her twin more aware of their danger. Even now, Jillian was barely coping with their situation; they’d been playing WWII prisoner of war for two days now. Louise comforted herself with the knowledge that Jillian probably was making important progress in their actual escape. Hopefully. “Mice? What are you talking about?”

“Getting across the border on the next Shutdown. There’s a pedestrian-only gate between the North Side and the North Hills. Only Pittsburgh residents can use it to visit Earth; they’re given a bracelet that allows them to quickly cross back through the gate later without the hassle of checking visa paperwork.” Jillian put aside the baseball and glove to pull up a map on her tablet. “See, Pittsburghers park in this lot here, walk through this gate, and they’re on this dead-end street. They can walk down to this corner and catch a bus that only runs during Shutdown that loops from this bus stop to these local malls. The setup only works because none of the roads on either side actually connects to the four highways that link Pittsburgh to Earth. The normal traffic jams that happen at Shutdown don’t affect this area.”

If they could get to one of the North Hills malls, then they could take the bus to the gate. It was easy to see why April had ignored the option; the parking lot was in the middle of nowhere. Still, they could conceivably walk to Orville’s. “Why the mice?”

“We need something to distract the guards,” Jillian said. “It probably should be something small enough that they don’t call for reinforcements, but unwieldy enough that they can’t easily deal with it. Even a dozen people would be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of mice.”

“Why do they have to be robotic? Real mice would work just as well.”

“Real mice would probably just run and hide. Robotic mice could be programmed to ‘play’ and thus actively seek out humans and attempt to be chased.”

“And exploding?”

“Well — they don’t all have to explode. Just in case the EIA decided to ignore them, one or two should be able to blow up.”

It had the benefit that no one had probably tried it before; thus the EIA probably had no standard protocol for a mischief of exploding robotic mice. The biggest problem with the plan, however, was sheer lack of time.

“Where are we going to get that many robotic mice in twenty-six days? And have them modified to explode?”

“It’s a work in progress.” Jillian thud-thunked the baseball and caught it in her glove. “Maybe they could just have tasers.”

Louise had her doubts about the entire plan, but she kept them to herself. Jillian was starting to sound like herself; there was no reason to poke holes in her plan.

They ate at the dinner table alone — if “alone” meant they had an army of servants watching their every move. Said servants could not be coaxed into giving up any useful information on where Ming and Anna were beyond “not currently home.” Was Ming even on the planet? Yves had been at the mansion to take the call about the explosion. So far, though, they had not met him face-to-face. Where was Yves? Was he personally going to oversee dealing with the disaster? Or was he in some computer center, chasing down bank transactions? According to Louise’s last check, they had stolen over nine hundred million dollars from the secret elves. Getting caught now would be very, very bad.

Unlike the breakfast they’d eaten “alone” with Anna, the menu hadn’t been altered.

The “meat” was something that Louise chose to pretend was small lobsters. (They looked more like insects than crustaceans.) She also pretended to eat it by breaking it into tiny little bits with her fork and knife. No wonder Esme had stashed so much freeze-dried food in the secret room; she must have known that they would be in danger of starving to death on the elves’ weird diet. Louise comforted herself with knowing that they could have lukewarm mac and cheese back in their room later.

Jillian had taken the baseball and peaked cap with her. She spent the meal arranging accidents with the ball. Louise was glad for the little acts of courage and rebellion, but she could feel Celine slipping toward breaking. They were speeding toward a vast array of possibilities, none of them leading to happy endings. Louise kicked Jillian before Celine could start down any of the paths. Jillian gave Louise an innocent look but stopped.

Nine hundred million dollars bought a lot of robotic mice. The twins could download modified schematics straight to the Indonesian manufacturer that used a mixture of high-end 3D printers and cheap hand laborers to create the “toys.” While the factory could quickly mass-produce a limited run of robotic rodents, US Customs, however, took a dim view of all things that went boom. While there probably were ways around import laws, the red tape would delay shipments to Monroeville.

So they went with mice armed with tasers. They needed a working prototype prior to the start of production. Luckily they had ordered lots of exotic printing supplies while working on the museum heist and Aunt Kitty had dutifully packed it. The design work seemed to help keep Jillian distracted from her grief; the ball and glove sat idle until she sent the job to their 3D printer. Louise had created a pattern for the mouse “skin” and started to deconstruct the rabbit fur muffs that Anna had gotten with the winter coats that she insisted on buying for them. (Really, it was the middle of July! What was Anna thinking? Hopefully nothing to do with a mischief of mice. . )

Nine hundred million dollars also rented a warehouse in Monroeville and hired on a small staff that believed they worked for a Belizean importing company. They would take delivery of the mice and whatever else the twins needed for crossing the Pittsburgh border.

“With all this money, we could just buy a small island and hire someone to be the babies’ mother,” Jillian pointed out. “It would simpler.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Louise shivered slightly when she saw that the total was now over a billion dollars stolen and climbing slowly. How much more did they have to take until Ming was unable to act? Had they already crippled him and were now wasting valuable time? Or was this just the tip of the iceberg and leaving now would be too soon? Thoughts of staying and leaving both filled her with unease. Was she going to know when the time was right?

Jillian thud-thunked her baseball. “Just saying we could make it so no adults can tell us what to do.”

“Mary Poppins is not going to fly down out of the sky with her talking umbrella!” Although, in one dream, she had; but Louise was willing to bet that was a normal kind of dream and not a prophetic one. “If we hired someone, unless they’re complete idiots, they’re going to notice there’s no one taking care of us and that we have gobs of money. How long do you think it will take them to figure out that they could easily hurt us until we gave them everything?”

“We would hire nice people and do background checks.”

“Oh, grow up. The only people we could risk hiring are the type that wouldn’t call the police the moment they realized we were orphans living by ourselves. And someone like that would also be ones that steal us blind, first chance they got.”

“It always works out in the movies.” Jillian mumbled and thud-thunked her baseball again.

Louise opened her mouth to say, “Not in horror films,” but realized that Jillian had lifted up the WWII escapee persona like a shield to protect herself. Making Jillian see the truth would only hurt her now. They couldn’t afford, though, to chase after an impossible dream. “Babies need a real mother. Not a woman who had poverty or some disaster that forced her into giving birth to children she doesn’t want. They need someone like our mom. Someone that wants children. Someone that can love them completely. Someone that can be patient and strong and wise. .”

“They’ll have us.”

Louise hunched against a scream of denial. She felt so close to crumbling. She couldn’t bear the idea of being responsible for four real babies, each one as hungry as Joy, and as inquisitive as Nikola. Four Joy/Nikolas all with poopy diapers? Louise couldn’t be their mother. The babies needed someone that wasn’t teetering on the edge. They deserved someone that didn’t feel so eggshell fragile that they were starting to wonder when, not if, they would break under the stress.

The twins needed to save the babies. It would destroy them both to lose the babies now. But be the babies’ parents? No, they couldn’t do that.

Louise woke up to a mischief of singing mice. Four of them stood on her pillow; one tapped her on the nose. When she opened her eyes, they began to sing in four-part harmony.

“Blue Moon,” the four mice sang. “You saw me standing alone. Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.”

“Nikola?” Louise rubbed at her eyes, wondering if she were dreaming. When she’d fallen asleep, there had been only one naked mouse robot. She had been struggling to fit fur onto it. Her sewing skills weren’t matching up to the task of creating the form-fitting skin.

No, she was awake, and there were definitely four white-furred mice sitting on her pillow. They each had a tiny scarf of different colored fabric wrapped about their neck. The one with a blue muffler waved its hand, identifying itself as her baby brother while the other three clapped their tiny paws. It was very cute in a slightly creepy kind of way.

She sat up, careful not to knock them from the pillow. “How did you. .? There was only one. . And it was naked.” She cautiously picked up Nikola mouse to peer closely at its skin. The rabbit fur had been perfectly joined together so she could barely see the seams.

The babies all started to talk at once.

“Joy fitted the skins,” Pink Scarf said.

“We printed more mice!” Red Gingham said.

“She used magic!” Green Velvet said.

“It was boring waiting to take turns!” Pink cried.

“They’re kind of cramped, even just for one,” Nikola squeaked. It was still Christopher Robin’s Welsh lilt but sonic high, thin, and fast.

“So we made one for each of us!” the girls chorused.

“Vroom! Vroom!” Pink cried. “We can run really fast!”

“And climb!” Green added.

“We can race!” Pink cried.

And the girls took off running in a lap around Tesla, making high-pitched motor noises. Tesla lay unearthly still. Louise had gotten used to the babies moving the dog’s body. It was even creepier to see the big robot sitting idle.

The mice finished their lap with Pink winning.

“Joy made us racing scarfs.” Nikola showed off his blue muffler. “Mine is Wind Clan blue!”

“Mine’s wonderful amazing pink!” Pink cried. “I want goggles, too! Just like Tinker and Oilcan!”

It took Louise a moment to recognize the nicknames of their sister and cousin. It also made Louise realize that she’d been thinking of all of the babies as Nikola Tesla when only one of them was a boy. The three girls still were unnamed.

“Have you thought about names?” Louise asked.

“I want to be Jawbreaker,” Red Gingham stated.

“Jawbreaker?” Louise echoed, mystified.

“It’s Joy’s favorite candy,” Jawbreaker explained.

“Maybe. .” Louise hesitated in suggesting “Candy” as a name. It was one of those weak, sexist female names that always appalled her mother. “Girls should have names that allow them to be Supreme Court judges if they wanted. Sissy and Candy would have an uphill battle just because of their names.” Still, Candy had to be better than Jawbreaker. . right?

“I want to be Chuck Norris,” Pink announced as Louise struggled on with the whole “strong name” issue.

“Chuck Norris is a boy,” Nikola pointed out.

“I can be a boy if I want to be,” Pink stated firmly and then turned to Louise. “You get to pick your gender, don’t you?”

Before Louise could answer, Green Velvet squeaked, “I want to be Jawbreaker, too.”

“No! I said it first!” Red Gingham cried.

They collapsed into a ball of squirming fur as they wrestled for use of the name.

“Careful!” Louise caught them in her cupped hands before they could roll off the edge of the bed. “Hey, no fighting.”

They were so tiny and light. The two of them barely weighed anything at all as they squirmed about, all soft rabbit fur and plastic bones. They felt so fragile that it took her breath away. She could crush them by accident.

This isn’t really them, she reassured herself. They’re still safe within Tesla.

“What’s wrong with names like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey or Rachel Carson?”

“We want names like Tinker and Oilcan!” the babies squeaked in chorus. “They’re so cool! You should see them race! They’re awesome!”

“Race?” Louise wondered if she was mistaken about the whole “awake” thing.

Sometime during the night, the babies had visited the Jello Shot forum and discovered a vast treasure trove of pictures and video of Alexander. All of them had to do with hoverbike racing. The still shots were all after winning a race, covered with mud except where goggles protected her eyes, grinning triumphantly. In many of the photos, Orville was within arm’s reach, smiling just as brilliantly.

The Jello Shot people were divided in several camps. The haters were disappointed that Alexander didn’t look like the valkyrie from The Queen’s Salvage. What did Prince Yardstick see in such a short, dirty, wild thing? With so many beautiful female elves to choose from, why had he married her?

The romantics decided that the blonde in the video was a clear reference to Disney’s Cinderella and that Lemon-Lime had merely presented an iconic princess with a Pittsburgh twist. Clearly the masses weren’t ready for the truth, which was “Love is indeed blind.”

A growing number of fans, however, were entranced by Alexander. They wanted to know everything about her, hence the unearthed videos. The sources were Pittsburghers in college on Earth, people who had studied at the University of Pittsburgh, and the small but rabid niche fandom of hoverbike racing.

The Jello Shots had found an amateur documentary made during last year’s blistering hot summer. The filmmaker was Charles Wyatt, a grad student in history attending the University of Pittsburgh. Apparently it was his only effort at making a documentary, and it showed. All the scenes were horribly framed, badly scripted, and lacked anything in terms of editing. At least he had a rich, deep voice. He saw the hoverbike as the first integration of elf magic and human machine. It might turn out to be like the Jacquard loom, which could be “programmed” via paper tape, arguably the great-grandfather of the modern computer. “A chance to record history as it’s being made by the people actually making it,” Wyatt announced at the start of the video. He’d conceived of the documentary with only a few months left on Elfhome to film it. Almost immediately, he ran into an unexpected reluctance of those involved to talk to anyone with a camera.

Wyatt started with the president of a company that made hoverbikes.

The man laughed and shook his head. “I don’t really know how they work. I could rebuild the gearbox for the spell chain blindfolded, but explain how it actually makes the bikes move forward? No.”

There was a long surprised pause that hadn’t been edited out. “I was told you’ve made all the hoverbikes in Pittsburgh.”

“Mostly. There are a handful of custom jobs that we didn’t do. Deltas. The next generation. They’re faster.”

“How can you be the only manufacturer of hoverbikes and not know how they work?”

“We’re mostly just modifying motorcycles. We order in superbike racers with twin four-stroke twelve-hundred-cc engines. Hoverbikes need powerful engines for the lift drives. We strip them down for the engine, the transmission, and the entire electrical system, including the headlights — just about everything but the frames and the wheels. We discovered it was easier to carve the frame out of ironwood. The flexibility of the wood allows for more vibration damping and better impact tolerance.”

“Vibration? Like what you get while riding a bicycle on a rough road? Is it really that much of a problem in a flying vehicle?”

“No, not that. The spell chain is sensitive to some sound resonance. .” The president paused and considered the camera with a slight widening of his eyes, as if he realized everything he was saying was being recorded. “I’d rather not discuss specifics. Company secrets and all that.”

“But-but-but where do you get the spell chains?” Wyatt asked. “Who makes them? Are they actual chains?”

The president considered for a moment before admitting. “Yes, there’s a chain. The design is under patent, but we’re trying to keep it a literal black box. We have an exclusive licensing agreement with the inventor. Like I said, except for a handful of custom models, we’re sole producer of hoverbikes in Pittsburgh, and we would like to stay that way. It’s a small niche market, and we have to sink a lot of money into parts and labor before we can make a profit.”

“I understand. Historically, it’s the mass supply and demand that fuels innovation. When only a handful of companies could afford computers, the rate of improvement in the technology was minuscule compared to the leaps in advances when they became tools of the masses.”

“Pittsburgh doesn’t have masses. It’s still an expensive, nearly handmade piece of equipment with a very narrow profit margin.”

“But if you could find some way to translate them to Earth. .”

Suspicion filled the Pittsburgher’s face, and the segment ended with president gesturing that the camera should be turned off. “I think I’ve answered enough questions.”

Wyatt then proceeded to stop random people who owned hoverbikes and ask how they worked. The riders could explain that the lift drive took power from the gasoline engine and “somehow generated the vertical motion.” The more power into the lift drive, the higher the bike would hover, at the sacrifice of speed to the horizontal motion. That much they all knew.

One college student leaned against his hoverbike, shaking his head. “It hurts my brain when I try to understand it. The lift you can actually see if you’re like over a mud puddle. See. There’s a force pushing downwards, and it’s creating an equal and opposite reaction. But the forward motion? I really don’t know how it possibly works. Especially the fact that you can brake. Logically the bikes should be like boats in water; in a frictionless state, things in motion stay in motion. It’s not stopping on a dime, but you can brake — only I have not a clue how. It’s not like you throw out an anchor.”

Louise could guess which spell Alexander had used to create the lift. She wondered about the possible combinations of spells that could have created the forward motion of the hoverbike.

It took Wyatt weeks before he managed to catch Alexander on-camera. Even then, he wasn’t aware that he’d found the person that he was looking for. He’d cornered Team Tinker at the racetrack, packing up to leave for the day. Heavy steel toolboxes and a mud-covered hoverbike were being strapped down onto the back of a big flatbed truck with “Pittsburgh Salvage” painted onto the door. Two massive elfhounds came to their feet as Wyatt walked up to the team, their growls as deep and menacing as a grizzly bear’s.

“Bruno. Pete.” A man in a Team Tinker T-shirt called to the dogs, silencing them. “We don’t allow photographing of our riders except during the races. We do sell publicity photos. If you want pictures, come by our table in the concession area next week.”

There was a jump in time as Wyatt negotiated the right to continue filming. During the interval, Alexander appeared on the back of the flatbed. Hair damp from a shower, she wore a Team Tinker T-shirt, cargo shorts, and hiking boots. She stomped in and out of the shoot, checking gear and complaining about the heat. Either Wyatt had been banned from photographing her or he missed the subtle body language of the people arrayed around him. Alexander might have been the youngest member of the team, but her teammates rotated around her like planets about a star. Instead, Wyatt kept the camera trained on the team’s business manager, who was only identified by the name of “Roach.” (Everyone in Pittsburgh apparently used weird nicknames.)

“Everyone I’ve talked to says that the Chang family might have built the race track but it was Team Tinker that started the sport.”

“I suppose,” Roach admitted cautiously. “Most of us went to high school together.” This generated a rude noise from Alexander. “Those of us that went to high school. The statistical outliers we met through business.” Another rude noise. “Roach Refuse.” He tapped his chest. “Pittsburgh Salvage.” He waved vaguely toward the truck. “Even people with brains the size of a planet need help with how to successfully run a business when they’re first starting out, and I learned it at my grandfather’s knee.”

“How did you start the sport? Where did you get the hoverbikes? Were they already invented or was that part of coming up with the sport?”

Roach’s eyes widened slightly and the corner of his mouth twitched with what might have been a nervous laugh. He started to turn toward Alexander, but she cut him short with, “Ah-uh! You’re the one that agreed to this!” He winced and ducked his head to kick at the ground for a moment.

Orville came onto camera, freshly showered, carrying his muddy riding leathers and a cherry ice pop. With a wary look at Wyatt, he handed the ice pop to Alexander. He asked a silent question with the jerk of his head and Alexander snorted with utter disgust. The cousins sat side by side on the edge of the truck’s bed as Alexander sucked on the ice pop and listened to Roach trying to explain.

“It’s not like we don’t have money,” Roach said. “But in Pittsburgh, we use barter a lot instead of cash. It’s a simple way to cut out the middleman who would normally take a big chunk of the profit to collect and redistribute goods. I’ve got a puppy. The guy who wants an elfhound has a half dozen old snowmobiles that are useless eight months out of the year. I know how to set up accounting books so the county won’t hassle you.” He jerked his head in the direction of the cousins. “They know how to cannibalize snowmobiles into something more all-weather. The thing nobody has a lot of are tires, especially ones for ATVs. Harder than sin to come by. We’re sitting around, drinking beer, having a bull session on where we could scrounge up tires, and the little mad scientist starts to giggle.”

A woman walked into camera range, carrying gear that she dropped beside Alexander. “Usually a very terrifying thing, and you want to get out of blast range as quickly as possible, but still be in viewing distance, because it will be worth watching.”

Alexander glared at the woman, who danced away from a halfhearted kick.

Roach took a couple of steps out of reach, too. “A week later, we all had hoverbikes. And of course, the most natural thing in the world is to race them.”

There was a long silence after Roach came to the end of his story. Wyatt waited for more but none was coming. Judging by the looks Roach was giving Alexander, he was vaguely afraid of saying anything else.

“You’re Team Tinker,” Wyatt broke the silence. “Is Tinker the one that invented the hoverbikes? I’ve heard all sorts of wild rumors about Tinker.”

The racing team all froze in place at the question.

“What wild rumors?” Alexander had been in the middle of licking melted ice pop off her fingers.

“Umm.” The camera bobbed as Wyatt accessed his notes. “Umm. The half-elf that runs the general store in McKees Rocks said that Tinker lives in the middle of the river and hands out magical swords to future kings.”

“What?” the entire team half-shouted, half-laughed.

“Yeah, it sounded really Arthurian to me,” Wyatt said. “I talked to a few elves, and they all said that Tinker is a baby wood sprite, which apparently is a race of very clever but dangerous elves or a very clever but dangerous raccoon. My Elvish isn’t that good.”

Roach was making little snorts as he tried to hold in his laughter.

Orville scooped up Alexander as she started to sputter and carried her off-camera.

“One person, an EMT, by the name of Johnnie Be Good, claimed that Tinker fathered most of the half-elves in Pittsburgh and is Blue Sky Montana’s real father.”

Roach lost control of his laughter. After a full minute of laughing, he wiped tears out of his eyes and stated, “That one is utterly true.”

There was a howl of anger and the video went black. Captions explained that Roach had ducked a helmet thrown at him, and it hit the unsuspecting Wyatt instead. His only camera broken, he was unable to continue filming. The team reimbursed him for his camera. There was no indication, however, that they ever told him the truth.

Louise played the interview with Team Tinker over and over again. This was her older twin sister. Their cousin Orville, who obviously was loving and protective and caring. Their close friends that they could count on. A warm and bright happy moment that Louise wanted for herself.

The babies, however, quickly grew bored of it and started to add mini-windows to the screen to show off clips of Alexander and Orville racing on hoverbikes. The mice stood on her shoulders, tugging at her hair and pointing, squeaking excitedly.

“Maybe we can make mini-hoverbikes!” Nikola stated. “They use a gasoline engine only because they need to lift the weight of an adult. If we can figure out what spells Alexander used, we could just stand on top of a magic generator and fly.”

The thought of the four mice zipping around the bedroom like hyper bats felt dangerous. Louise knew that the mice bodies were merely remotely run puppets for the babies, but mini-hoverbikes just seemed to have “will not end well” written all over it. (Even though she had to admit — quietly to herself — that she didn’t know it would. Surely common sense overruled precognition.)

At least they had a completely tested prototype of the robotic mouse. While the babies were still focused on some newly added racing videos, Louise ordered ten thousand mice from the Indonesia factory. Not that they needed that many; it was the smallest number that the manufacturer would take on rush order.

“Lou!” Chuck Norris tugged on Louise’s hair to get her attention. “What does this mean?”

The babies had found a new video. Someone had splintered down the documentary and picked out only the frames of Alexander sucking on the cherry ice pop. They looped the few seconds to prolong the action for two minutes and then ended with her licking her fingers. The title of video was “Why Prince Yardstick loves Tinker.”

She winced. “I’m not sure, but it probably has to do with sex.”

“What’s sex?” the babies asked in chorus.

Louise blushed hotly. “It’s icky stuff that adults do.”

“What kind of icky stuff?” The babies started into a barrage of questions. “If it’s icky, why do they want to do it? Is it like eating Brussels sprouts?”

Brussels sprouts? “I don’t want to have to explain it. It’s icky. Don’t ask.”

The babies were working systematically through the postings. Louise noticed that one post further down was generating thousands of shares per second. It was titled “Announcing Prince Windwolf and Princess Tinker.” She clicked it and discovered someone had used the documentary to do a 3D rendering of Alexander and then paired her with a scale model of Windwolf. The animator had dressed the male elf in a white tuxedo with his long black hair falling loosely over his shoulders. Alexander wore a skin-tight elfin gown of fairy silk in Wind Clan blue. They stood holding hands, looking like two teenagers about to go to the prom. They bowed to the camera and then turned to look into each other’s eyes. Music started and the two started to waltz. During the documentary, Alexander hadn’t gotten down off the truck bed, so she never seemed overly short. But if the render was correct, Louise and Jillian weren’t going to get much taller.

Louise realized that the animation on the waltz was very good quality. She checked the credits and squeaked with surprise. A real animation studio had created the piece.

With sudden foreboding, Louise closed the Jello Shots forum and did a general search on the title. There were a hundred pages of hits. Apparently frustrated by the lack of pictures of Alexander and Windwolf together, one of the tabloid new feeds had paid for the animation. “What is a Wood Sprite?” had also become a meme with various odd animals PhotoShopped onto the flat bed, licking the cherry ice pop. Red pandas. Koala bears. Gibson monkeys. And most alarming, one featuring Disney’s version of Tinker Bell. Whimpering, Louise typed in “Princess Alexander Graham Bell” and Alexander’s picture came up complete with a small bio explaining that she was the daughter of Leonardo da Vinci Dufae. The information apparently had been supplied by the EIA Director, Derek Maynard. Unlike all the pictures of Alexander covered in mud, the bio had frames from the documentary. The family resemblance between Alexander and the twins was unmistakable.

Yves was going to find the photos. Yves was going to see the family resemblance and realize what Esme had done. He was going to know what the twins were.

“We need to go.” Louise told Jillian when she woke her twin. She fought to keep her voice calm and level even though the enormity of what was ahead of them scared her. They still hadn’t figured out how they were going to get away from the mansion without getting caught or where they were going to go or how they were going to stay hidden. “Let’s get packed to leave.”

“Huh?” Jillian sat up, rubbing at her eyes. “Now? What happened?”

“The Jello Shots dug up a bunch of videos of Alexander and they’re getting plastered everywhere. Sooner or later, Yves is going to figure everything out. We’ve got to go before he does.”

Jillian squinted at her, apparently still half-asleep, stepping through the logic. “Videos?”

“Of Tinker and Oilcan!” Chuck Norris squeaked.

“Racing!” Red Gingham Jawbreaker cried.

“But we can’t get to Elfhome now!” Nikola cried. “It’s twenty-five days to Shutdown. We haven’t moved all the money yet. .”

“. . and we don’t have all the mice!” the girls chorused with Nikola.

“I know.” Louise waved them all to be calm, even though fear skittered about inside her. “Everything can go as planned — just someplace else — not here — as far away from here as possible.”

The babies rapid-fired questions in excited squeaks. “Where are we going? How are we going to get there? Can we make the mini-hoverbikes first? We can use the magic generators. Oh, we’ll need to make more generators to make one for each of us. We’re taking the mice, too, aren’t we? What are we taking with us?”

“Holy hell!” Jillian cried. “Where did the mice come from?”

Louise let the babies explain in a confusing four-part narrative. She could only think of all the things tucked into the back of the walk-in closet. Their favorite Christmas ornaments. The family tree that had hung over the fireplace in living room. Their mom’s wedding rings. Everything so precious that it hurt to look at them. Too painful for Jillian to even deal with. Were they going to have to abandon it all?

If we can rob a museum without getting caught, we can sneak back later and get our stuff.

Even as she tried to comfort herself, she knew it wasn’t true. The future that was hurtling toward them was dark and full of pain, and there would be no coming back.

“We have to leave today,” Louise made herself say while trying to think of what they had to take. Other than the babies and Joy, what did they really need? Their tablets and phones and the flash drive of the codex. Louise found her backpack and set it down in the middle of the floor.

They had money. Lots of money. In theory they could buy anything they needed. In truth, kids normally didn’t buy anything alone. Not real food like frozen vegetables and raw fish. Not real clothes like underwear and jeans. Children always followed behind their parents who pushed carts in supermarkets. They were supposed to stand quietly behind the adult paying the cashier at department stores. And children never checked into hotels alone.

We’ll figure it out, Louise thought firmly to hold back the fear. They probably should take a change of clothes until they worked out basic life necessities. One shirt, a pair of jeans, and a single set of clean underwear, however, took up most of her backpack. They probably should take all of their socks and underwear, not just one set. Louise raided their underwear drawer and struggled to pack it all into the space remaining in her backpack. Nothing else would fit, even if they desperately needed it. Should she take the blue jeans out?

Panic surged up through Louise, like a shout that wanted to be let out. She covered her mouth, trying to keep it all in. How much could someone take before they broke?

“We may not have to wait,” Jillian said.

Louise stared at her for a minute. She’d lost track of what they were talking about. She’d never said anything about waiting, had she? “What?”

“We might not have to wait for Shutdown to get to Pittsburgh.” Jillian ducked into the secret room. Her muffled voice came through the open door. “Remember that in the codex, Dufae talked about the pathways between Elfhome and Earth.”

“Yes, but after his wife died, he tried to take his son back to Elfhome and all the pathways had been deliberately destroyed. He didn’t find one that was still intact.”

“In Europe he couldn’t find one intact!” Jillian came back out carrying an armful of papers that she spilled out onto the card table. “Dufae died in 1791. Windwolf was the first elf to land on the Westernlands in 1910. In the 1700s, North America was still largely unexplored. Even if Windwolf had access to the maps created by the humans, most of the cave systems wouldn’t have been marked. There are only a few thousand elves in the Westernlands even now, so they couldn’t have checked out all the cave systems.”

The papers were dozens of cave maps. Some of them were real geological surveys and others were brochures by tour companies that owned the cavern. Jillian sorted through the papers. The babies climbed up the table’s wooden legs and complicated the process by trying to study the maps themselves.

“Ming married Anna before the first Startup,” Jillian said. “If he was relying on the pathways in Europe to get to Elfhome, and they were destroyed, he would have had to search out a new way.”

Louise followed her logic. “Which is why Esme was collecting the maps.”

“Collected them and kept them hidden. If she just had some weird love of caves, they’d be on her bookcases, not stashed in the secret room.”

Louise looked down at the dozens of maps. “If there’s this many choices, then he was still looking. He didn’t find a way.”

Jillian whimpered slightly, shrinking with disappointment. She looked as if she was in danger of collapsing back to the stranger that had huddled in the bed the last few weeks. “That’s true.”

“But your reasoning is sound.” Louise rushed to repair the damage. “It proves that the pathways are natural formations and that the elves didn’t destroy the ones in the Westernlands. Ming has been seeking a pathway, so he believes it’s there, but he doesn’t really know how to find it.”

“How could it be so hard? He found this place.” Jillian gasped. “Wait! This place has magic, so it’s linked to Elfhome. Maybe this is like stately Wayne Manor with bat caves all under it.”

“There are caves!” Chuck Norris stated firmly.

“But there aren’t any bats,” Nikola added with some uncertainty.

“Not that we noticed!” the Jawbreakers finished.

“When were you in caves?” both twins shouted.

The babies cringed.

“Two days after we arrived,” Nikola volunteered.

“It was boring watching you sleep!” Chuck Norris cried. “So we went exploring!”

“We didn’t get into any trouble!” Green Jawbreaker stated.

“You never said that we couldn’t,” Red Jawbreaker stated.

“And why do we have to do what you tell us?” Chuck Norris asked. “Don’t we get to vote? We outnumber you!”

“Yeah!” her two sisters cried.

“No, you don’t get a vote!” Jillian shouted, throwing her hands up in the air. “Don’t ever leave the bedroom again without us!”

“Unless it’s important — like the mansion is on fire.” Louise earned an annoyed look from her twin. She was more worried, though, about the future than the past. The damage was already done. She couldn’t figure out how the babies even got Tesla out of the bed without them noticing. They always slept with the bed in the raised position.

“We didn’t actually leave,” Nikola said.

His sisters nodded. “We didn’t.”

“You said you left,” Jillian growled.

“We did, but we didn’t,” they cried.

“Oh, that’s perfectly clear,” Jillian grumbled.

“Tesla didn’t leave the room, but we did.” Nikola attempted to clarify. “We just didn’t have any bodies.”

“Huh?” Jillian looked utterly confused.

“Oh.” Louise realized what Nikola meant. It was like when she dreamed of the babies. They existed somehow separate of Tesla as well as integrated with him. If they could enter her dreams, then moving through the house like ghosts wasn’t completely impossible, just very weird. “I understand.”

“You do?” Jillian cried. “I don’t.”

“The babies dream-walked,” Louise said.

Nikola nodded vigorously and then pointed toward Louise’s feet. “Joy showed us how.”

Joy was pulling the clean underwear from Louise’s backpack and tossing them over her shoulder. She had cans of freeze-dried blueberry cheesecake stacked beside her. She looked up, wide-eyed with surprise at being the center of attention.

“Joy!” Louise cried. Their underwear was scattered all across the bedroom floor.

“Must take yummies!” Joy shoved the cans into the emptied bag. “Not stupid panties.”

“No, junk food is the one thing we can get easily!” Louise gathered up the underwear.

“Wait!” Jillian shouted. “Dream-walked? What the hell does that mean?”

“Shhh!” Louise bent down, trying to unload enough of the cans to fit the clothes back into the bag. “The secret elves might hear.”

“What does it mean?” Jillian whispered fiercely.

“They astral-projected. That’s how the babies are talking to us through Tesla. It’s their spirits. Their souls.” Louise sighed at the disbelieving look Jillian was giving her. “They’re sitting on top of a magic generator. And they’re elves. Maybe all elves can dream-walk.”

Joy made a raspberry and jerked the can out of Louise’s hand. “Not elf. Dragon, silly!”

“What?” both twins cried.

“Joy says that we’re related to two dragons: Brilliance and Clarity. That’s why we can dream-walk.”

Surely that couldn’t be right. Still, Dufae’s Elvish name had been Unbounded Brilliance. There were certainly lots of myths about dragons having children that were very humanlike. Louise struggled not to get distracted by the possibility. “So there are caves under the mansion?”

Nikola nodded. “Caves, but we didn’t notice any bats.”

Jillian disappeared back into the secret room, mumbling about billionaires with secret identities and their propensity for secret lairs. She returned with a fat roll of papers nearly four feet long, and unrolled to be nearly four feet wide. Esme had provided them — somehow — with a copy of the blueprints of the mansion. Judging by the frayed edges marked on the copies as jagged lines, they were scans of the original as-built prints. “Ming has to know the caves are there. I’m sure he picked this place because of the magic.” Jillian flipped through the pages until she hit the last one that showed an entire warren of rough-shaped rooms under the mansion. According to the title block, the cave systems had been labeled as sub-basement. “Holy bat caves!”

“No bats!” the babies all squeaked.

Louise studied the maze. It seemed too easy to be true. Surely they couldn’t just slip through the mansion’s cellars and come out on Elfhome. The magic, though, was coming from somewhere. Dufae had written about leakage from his world to Earth. If there were a pathway, surely Ming would claim it for himself and keep it well hidden from the eyes of mankind.

As she studied the blueprint, though, nothing seemed to suggest that there was a pathway to another world. “There’s no way to get a car or even a horse down into the caves easily.” She pointed out what seemed to be the only staircase into the area through the mansion’s large walk-in pantry. “According to this, the mansion was built in 1890. It was another twenty years before Windwolf came to the Westernlands, and he might have settled anywhere on the East Coast, or even gone to — whatever they call South America. Ming wouldn’t have had to hide moving people and supplies to Elfhome from Earth, because there weren’t any elves to see.”

Jillian pouted and reached for her ball and glove. “But if we could get to Elfhome here in Hudson Valley, we would be at Aum Renau.”

“Windwolf probably picked this area for the same reason Ming chose it. First thing Dufae did was find places on Earth opposite massive pools of magic so he could cast spells with what leaked across. On Elfhome, right here, there’s probably the strongest source of magic on the continent.”

Which reminded Louise that they should take some of their most portable spell-casting supplies. It looped her back to the realization that they would have to abandon everything left of their parents.