Wood Sprites (25 page)
Authors: Wen Spencer
“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.
Louise felt like she was going to be sick. She was so nervous her stomach was a queasy roil. At the same time, she couldn’t stop grinning widely. They were going to do it, actually rob a museum like two cat burglars.
Part of her really wished they were going to do a traditional middle-of-the-night entrance through a skylight, but it was far easier and simpler to slip into the museum in broad daylight while it was still open. With the museum closing at 5:45, they could even be home before their parents could deeply question their “working late on the play” alibi.
The American Museum of Natural History had its own entrance from the 81st Street Subway Station. There were beautiful tile mosaics of a coral reef with sharks and fish. The twins stood, pretending to study the art while everyone who arrived with them swept out of the station.
They backtracked to a blind corner and quickly assembled their gear. The spell needed to be printed onto a three-dimensional surface that stayed rigid while the magic was active. After a lot of experimenting, they’d found that wardrobe moving boxes worked best. The forty-eight-inch-tall cardboard boxes covered them head to toe and were sturdy enough for the spell to work while they moved around.
Louise was all fumble-fingered as she carefully taped up her box. It had to be fitted together completely square. Then, seeming impossibly slow, she peeled the protective sheet off the circuit tracings and stuck them to the box. Everything had to match perfectly or the spell wouldn’t work.
When she was done, she glanced to see if Jillian had finished her box.
Jillian was gone.
“Where are you?” Louise called.
Jillian’s muffled voice came from near the tile mosaic. “Over here.”
“I can’t see you,” Louise said without thinking.
“Doh!” Jillian’s voice grew nearer. “Hurry up. We only have a few minutes before they shut the doors!”
“Okay, I’m almost ready.” She lifted up the box and let it slide down over her. In the darkness, she activated the magic generator. She gave it a minute and then spoke the words that triggered the spell. “Did it work?”
Jillian huffed nearby. “Wait a minute, I’ll check.” There was a muffled scuffling noise. “Well, I can’t see you, so I guess it worked. Let’s go.”
The drawback to the spell was that they couldn’t cut eyeholes in the boxes. Nor could they mount cameras to the top of the boxes. They were basically running blind. Keeping the subway wall to their right, they started forward. Or at least Louise assumed they were both walking forward. She couldn’t hear anything but her banging heart, nervous breathing and the soft scuff of her shoes. The scent of cardboard seemed nearly suffocating; why hadn’t she noticed it before?
She went as carefully as possible down the subway hallway, toward the museum. They’d marked the edge of the museum’s surveillance with a piece of tape. Once she crossed it, she turned on her phone and used the back door they’d created in the museum’s surveillance system to watch the flow of people coming and going. They’d discovered if they moved sideways quickly, there was a slight blur in the video. It let them track their own movements with a small risk of discovery counterbalanced by the ability to dodge other people. She wove around a woman with a stroller and a group of Japanese tourists.
Her heart jumped as they passed the threshold into the museum proper. They were almost safe. There were people coming and going from the bathrooms on the right, so she kept to the left. At the end of the hallway, she turned left and went back toward the lunchrooms for school groups on field trips. The doors were shut and locked, but it gave a safe spot to crouch, out of the way, until the museum actually closed. There was a time stamp in the corner of the surveillance video. 5:32:03. They had cut it close.
At 5:35, the second closing announcement was broadcast, echoing through the nearly empty museum. After the English request for visitors to leave the museum, it repeated in Spanish and then Japanese.
Guards went into the bathrooms around the corner, their voices echoing on the tile. “We’re closing. Anyone in here?” They heard the thud of bathroom stall doors being swung open to make sure no one was standing on the toilets.
At 5:45, the recording of “The American Museum of Natural History is now closed” played in three languages as the big metal shutter rattled shut, closing off the subway station.
They’d done it. They were inside the museum after closing! They were now officially cat burglars.
“Meow,” Louise whispered.
The hardest part was going to be waiting another ten minutes before moving to be sure they avoided any last-minute sweeps of guards. There were still cleaning crews and guards and employees working late to dodge, but they should be few and far between.
Louise opened another window and checked on Tesla via a traffic camera. They had bought him the climbing feet attachments and had him scale the forty-foot granite pedestal to hide at the feet of the Chinese astronaut Jin Wong. The bronze statue of the man had odd wing-things spread wide behind him. Even after close study, and an extensive Internet search, Louise and Jillian weren’t sure what they represented. Its location across the street from the museum, its height, and the wings made it a perfect place to hide Tesla. Even on the high traffic camera, the robot dog was invisible.
Reassured that Tesla was still safe, Louise closed the window and waited.
At 5:54:30 something collided with her. She yipped in surprise.
Jillian whispered a curse word. “It’s just me.”
Louise checked her phone. The screen showed the hallway clear. It should be safe to talk, and they needed to keep from running into each other. “You take right. I’ll keep left.”
Jillian’s feet appeared on the screen as her twin lifted up the box to hear better. “What?”
“Stay on the right side of the hallway.” Louise repeated and moved to the left side of the wide hallway. “I’ll go left.”
“Okay.” Jillian’s feet vanished as she dropped down the box.
They needed to get to the third floor from the basement without colliding with anyone. The fastest way would be the elevators, but guards would see and hear the cars moving. They were hoping that the escalators wouldn’t be turned off immediately. They’d found going up stairs in the boxes cumbersome.
The good news was that if they moved slowly, there wasn’t even a blur of motion on the monitors.
The bad news was that if they moved slowly, it was easy to lose track of where they were and run into walls. The hallway did a weird dogleg and they found themselves in a dead end, bouncing off each other.
Jillian was stuttering in frustration. “Ompfh! No! Ah! Don’t.”
“Shh!” Louise hissed.
“Stand still!” Jillian whispered.
So Louise stood still as Jillian moved forward quickly to establish her location on the screen and bounced off another wall with another muffled swear word. Louise used her twin’s voice and the blur on her phone to orient herself. She was facing the exact opposite direction they needed to go. Jillian turned and headed the right way in a quick shuffle. Louise turned around and cautiously followed.
Luckily the escalators were still on. It felt odd riding up inside the box, not able to see where they were going, knowing that they couldn’t be seen.
At the top, she bumped into Jillian again.
“Go right!” Louise whispered.
“Are you sure?”
Louise flipped to the online map. They should be right off the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall on the first floor. They needed to walk around to the next set of up escalators. “Yes.”
Second floor. Akeley Hall of African Mammals. Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda.
Third floor. Reptiles and Amphibians.
Her phone’s screen showed the exhibit area empty of people, but the lights were still on. The glass display cases were full of taxidermied reptiles. A Komodo dragon gleamed in the perpetual dimness. She had been worried that the museum staff would start turning off lights, but now she was starting to wonder why they hadn’t. It was now after 6:00.
The Lost Treasures of Elfhome exhibit was in the hall beyond the reptiles. When the twins had checked earlier, there had been a barrier up, directing the visitors back through the upper level of the African Mammal hall. While they’d been on the train, the barrier had been taken down.
Dufae’s box sat against the west wall, screened on all sides by the taller displays. According to e-mails, the case would receive a glass lid after the elves visited the exhibit. The lighting had been aimed so it gleamed off the gold inlay of the spell-lock glyphs.
Louise had won the flip of the coin earlier. She shimmied the box up and off. She checked her phone’s screen. It was still showing the empty exhibit hall. Wetting her mouth, she spoke the keyword to unlock the spell.
The band of glyphs gleamed and a seam appeared in the wood with a quiet
thunk
. The lid slid up and off easier than she’d imagined for not having been opened for hundreds of years.
Inside were a dozen spheres nestled in velvet-lined holes. They were much bigger than chicken eggs, but had the same oval shape. A spell had been etched into the surface of the
nactka
. When she picked one up, it seemed oddly warm and heavier than she expected. It wasn’t made of gold as she had first thought; the material felt more like ivory under her fingers, feeding her impression that it had once been the bone of some magical creature, cut into an egg shape and hollowed out. She shivered and carefully placed it into the snow globe box from the gift shop.
Jillian’s voice came out of nothing on the other side of Dufae’s chest. “Incoming!”
Louise quickly put the lid back on the chest and spoke the locking word. The glyphs gleamed and with another quiet
thunk
the seam vanished. Back toward the reptiles, the elevator dinged quietly.
“Go,” Louise whispered as certainty filled her. “If we’re both here running blind, we’ll get caught. Take the backup route. Go! I’ll catch up.”
Jillian gave a muffled curse, but she went because she always got caught when she didn’t listen to Louise.
Louise tucked the boxed
nactka
into her backpack, felt around to find her invisibility box, and lifted it up and shimmied it down over her. There were footsteps coming quickly in her direction.
She was almost to the door out of the exhibition area, into the primates, when the elevator in front of her also dinged and its doors opened. She bit down on a squeak and skittered sideways until she hit a wall and backed into a blind corner.
On her screen, Louise saw that three people had gotten out of the elevator. The first was a man with a museum badge pinned to his shirt pocket. She nearly squeaked in surprise to see that the two people following him were elves. It was the queen’s delegation to inspect the exhibit for culturally important pieces! What were they doing here now? They were supposed to come tomorrow during a big black-tie event.
Despite the grainy texture of the surveillance camera, Louise instantly recognized Sparrow Lifted by Wind. The female elf wore a fairy silk gown, and her gleaming hair spilled down to the floor all braided with beads and jewels and ribbons and flowers. In the center of her forehead was the blue bindi triangle that she alone wore. Most importantly, the female elf was trailed only by Bladebite. Where were the other four
sekasha
?
“Look out!” Louise frantically texted to Jillian, who was moving somewhere through the museum below. “Elves!”
Bladebite was stating something forcefully as he gestured about them. He was using High Elvish, which Louise couldn’t follow at all.
“It is a treasure house,” Sparrow answered in Low Elvish. She flicked her hand, dismissing him. “The doors are locked. There are dozens of guards. It is safe. Go. Look.”
Bladebite continued to protest even as Sparrow moved away from the elevator.
“Go. Look.” Sparrow walked past Louise without pausing to see if the
sekasha
followed.
Nor did he. Far below in the stairwell there was a slight noise, like a muffled sneeze, that Louise knew in her heart of hearts
had
to be Jillian.
The warrior glanced toward Sparrow and then, shaking his head, started down the stairs.
Oh, for once, Jillian, please don’t get caught
, Louise thought as hard as she could. Blindly charging after Bladebite, though, seemed like the wrong thing to do. If for no other reason than the fact that the museum staff member was walking in circles, trying to keep both elves in view. Louise was afraid that she’d collide with him.
The man wasn’t sure which person to follow. “Um, I thought we were going to, um, wait, I’m not sure if you can . . . Right.” He turned and spotted someone across the room. “Yves? What are you doing here?”
“The EIA asked us to facilitate this since we’re trustees for most of the museums that donated to this exhibit. I brought Ambassador Feng with me. He’s the United Nations’ representative for these negotiations. His translator has taken ill.
Parlez-vous Français?
”
Ambassador Feng could have been mistaken as an elf even though he wore a dark business suit. He was tall and elegant and handsome, with long black hair and almond-shaped dark eyes. Only his round ears marked him as human. He stirred uncomfortably, looking annoyed at the museum staff person.