Wood Sprites (22 page)

At some point along the way, unnoticed by Aunt Kitty or Louise, Jillian had gained a big bandage just above her left eye. To strangers, Jillian probably looked like a poor little war orphan. To Louise, the bandage gave Jillian pirate flair.

As the museum security stopped them at the entrance because of Tesla, Jillian explained with a convincing waver in her voice, “After what happened at our school yesterday, we feel safer with him. Can’t we please keep him with us?”

Aunt Kitty eyed the bandage with hidden dismay, but played along. “They go to Perelman. The bomb was right across the street. They had a rough day yesterday and wanted to do something to take their minds off the explosion.”

The girls had to produce their Perelman School for the Gifted student ID badges to verify this claim. After a quick conference with the powers that be and a search of Tesla’s storage chamber, they were allowed to take their “beloved” nanny-bot into the museum.

“Girl, you are going to be dangerous when you’re eighteen.” Aunt Kitty seemed torn between dismay and amusement. “Turn the world upside down and inside out.”

“I’m really hoping that I don’t have to wait that long,” Jillian said.

Aunt Kitty laughed then.

Louise cringed inside. She hated that they had to lie to their aunt. In many ways, she was a cohort in crime, but only to a point. Much as she loved to kidnap them away for adventures, she always kept in mind that they weren’t her kids. She carefully never crossed any line that their mother set. Thus she never gave them Coke to drink, never let them stay up past their bedtimes, and never,
never
would let them rob a museum.

They’d programmed Tesla to search out security cameras and map out their field of vision. With what he was recording, they hoped to be able to find all the blind spots in the museum. His optic system abided by the museum rules on cameras since he wasn’t using a flash. If the security people had known how his guidance system could be exploited, they probably wouldn’t have allowed him to enter the building.

The twins picked up maps handed out at the ticket booth and glided upstairs on the escalators. Everywhere Louise looked, there was a security guard. The colony exhibit was in the Special Exhibition Gallery 3, which would also be the site of the Elfhome’s Lost Treasures. Judging by the maps they’d studied a few nights ago, the museum chose it because it was the largest space for traveling exhibits.

“You really wanted to see this?” Aunt Kitty asked as they pondered the first display.

“Yes.” Jillian hesitated and then said in what sounded like the truth but wasn’t, “We really thought it would be more interesting than this. And it closes at the end of the month, so this was almost the last chance to see it—just in case it was more interesting.”

The first display was a very detailed model of the Chinese hyperphase gate in orbit. It looked very much like a bicycle wheel with a large inner ring that was the gate part of the station. Dozens of thin spokes connected the inner ring to an outer one where the crew lived. The long, slender needle of a colony ship was poised to thread through the eye of the gate and jump to the Alpha Centauri star system. A sign identified the ship as the
Minghe Hao
, which had left Earth three years ago.

While the ship and gate were in scale to each other, the Earth below was not. The two threw a massive shadow down onto the planet, blotting out everything from Malaysia to the Philippines. Because of the scale problem, the International Shipyard loomed beside the gate, closer than it really was. The next colony ship, the
Shenzhou Hao
, was being pieced together from segments shipped up in large prefabricated pieces from China. Obviously the scene was totally a figment of the model maker’s imagination, as the
Shenzhou Hao
hadn’t been started when the
Minghe Hao
slipped through the gate with little fanfare. The
Shenzhou Hao
wasn’t finished; even through its original departure date had been years ago.

Louise wasn’t sure why the display seemed so uninteresting. She studied it for a moment, noticing that they hadn’t added weather patterns to Earth, nor sunlight to indicate the Earth’s revolution. Maybe they thought people would be confused by what geostationary orbit meant if the entire display spun. There was no movement at all, not even lights blinking in the Shipyard to indicate construction of the various sections of the spaceship.

She had a sudden and awful feeling that she was looking at a frozen moment in time. A doomed ship, forever stuck on the event horizon of disaster. Had the
Minghe Hao
actually arrived safely? Or had it crashed?

“Wǒ kàn bù dào!”
a child’s voice complained loudly in what sounded like Mandarin.

Louise glanced across the room as she struggled to translate the complaint.
I can’t see!

A flock of children crowded around the last display: a life-size statue of Jin Wong, captain of the first colony ship. Faces reverent, the children lightly touched fingertips to the glass. There were too many of them to be one family, but their ages were too scattered to be kids on a school field trip. A kindergartener with long black pigtails stood on tiptoe, trying to see past the older children, who looked like they could be in middle school.

“Wǒ kàn bù dào!”
the little girl cried again in Mandarin. This time Louise was certain that she was complaining that she couldn’t see the statue.

A tall boy ghosted out of the shadows, gently shushing her. His quiet command was easy to translate. “Not so loud, Lai Yee Zhao.”

The little girl eyed the boy with almost the same awe as being leveled at Jin Wong.
“Yamabushi zhànshì, wǒ xiǎng kàn tā!”

Louise parsed through the sentence several times, trying to translate it and failing. She wasn’t sure what
yamabushi
meant, although
zhànshì
seemed to indicate it was a type of warrior. The last part seemed to be a complaint again that she couldn’t see the statue.

The boy scooped Lai Yee up so she could sit on his shoulder. She gazed in wide-eyed wonder and then pointed at the statue of Jin Wong.

“Is he dead?” the little girl asked, her voice still loud.

The
yamabushi
shushed her again. “We don’t know. He went away.”

“Why did he leave?” Lai Yee whispered loudly.

The other children half-turned to hear the answer.

The tall boy gazed at the starship captain for a moment before answering sadly, “To find another world for us to live on.”

“Elfhome?” the little girl asked.

And all the children shushed her.

Lai Yee was right: the first set of colonists had opened the door to another world. Ironically, Elfhome wasn’t light-years distant, but just an odd sidestep into another universe from any point on Earth. The distance to Alpha Centauri made all information on the colony four years out of date. Was that the reason the boy claimed that they didn’t know if Jin Wong was alive or dead? He’d been middle-aged when he left Earth; surely life as a colonist could not be easy for a man nearly seventy.

And what of Esme? How had she fared in the eighteen years? The bios all indicated that she was still alive, but they could be wrong. Something could have happened to the colony, and Earth wouldn’t know for years.

Jillian and Aunt Kitty were moving on to the next display, forcing Louise to guide Tesla into his next mapping position. Once Tesla was lined up, Louise pretended to study the model of the Alpha Centauri star system. As if to make up for the lack of movement in the first display, this one had the two stars whizzing through their complex dance with their various planets orbiting them. A red digital clock counted backwards, marking the time before the first reports about the
Minghe Hao
’s safe arrival would reach the Earth. Alpha Centauri was 4.37 light-years away; there remained four hundred and six days and a handful of hours before the fate of the ship could be known.

But there had been radio messages from the earlier ships. At least, Louise thought there had been. Why would the boy say that they didn’t know if Jin Wong was alive or not?

“Those poor people.” Aunt Kitty nodded at the crew photo of the
Minghe Hao
. “No one noticed when they left. No one will notice if and when they arrive. I don’t know why they keep sending out those ships. Even the first one—there was a ton of fanfare—and then Pittsburgh vanished—and everyone just forgot about the Chinese. It wasn’t until the Chinese started to flip the power on and off like a toddler with a light switch that anyone realized that the gate had anything to do with Pittsburgh blinking in and out of existence.”

And Elfhome had continued to steal the limelight since then. Despite their wealth of information on Earth’s mirror planet, the twins had known virtually nothing about the space mission that triggered its discovery until they learned of their own odd connection to it.

“The crews wanted to go.” Jillian led the way past the group photo of the second ship, the
Zhenghe Hao,
to stare at the crew of the
Dahe Hao
. Esme Shenske stood front and center as the captain. She looked so determined and fierce, like she was going to war. “They walked away from family and friends and ever coming back. I don’t think they cared a rat’s ass if anyone noticed or not.”

The tall boy glanced over as if he fully understood Jillian’s comment.

Louise looked down out of habit and nudged Jillian before she realized that she didn’t really know if he understood or what he thought. The twins were at the museum to plan a robbery to save their baby siblings. Until a month ago, they didn’t even know the names of the spaceships or any of their crew. Surely there was little common ground between her and this boy that worshiped Jin Wong, even if her genetic donor was a spaceship captain in her own right.

Louise looked back up at Esme.
Don’t care a rat’s ass if anyone noticed or not.
That’s how she had to be. Fierce and determined. They were going to war. Everyone better stay out of their way.

Only pretending to look at the rest of the Alpha Centauri exhibit, Louise focused just on the building. The hallway was one long, wide, vaguely boot-shaped corridor. There were only two openings, the toe into the reptile exhibit and the cuff into stair tower that faced West 77th Street.

According to e-mails between curators, it would take a week for the colony exhibit to be packed up and shipped to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The space would be cleaned as the Elfhome exhibit arrived from the Australian Museum in Sydney. The AMNH had scheduled a week to unpack and arrange the incoming display cases. During that time, Dufae’s chest would arrive from Paris, escorted by an assistant registrar. On June fourteenth, the exhibit would open to the public.

At the end of June, the frozen embryos would be thrown away.

It gave them less than a month between the time that Dufae’s box arrived in the United States and the last possible day to save their siblings. That narrow window opened in approximately twenty days. They had to be ready to slip into that opening and take what they needed.

At the end of the gallery, they continued through to the primates and then circled around through the North American birds, the New York State mammals and city birds and finally down through the African mammals to end up where they’d started. In the loop, the twins documented the two flights of stairs, the three elevators, the up and down escalators and the only restrooms on the floor. Since the access routes were grouped together into two tight knots, they only represented two main ways up to the level. A close examination of the map, however, showed that only one went all the way down to the lower level and access to the subway.

So while Jillian kept Aunt Kitty busy in the gift shop, Louise quickly mapped the second and first floors with Tesla. She noticed how many guards were walking around and the care that the staff was taking checking bags coming in and out of the museum. Even in the middle of the week, with the recent bombing canceling all school trips and most people’s travel plans, there were hundreds of visitors scattered among the floors. The twins couldn’t hope to set up the generator, open Dufae’s box, take out what they needed and get it locked again without a visitor seeing them. Obviously they were going to have to stage the robbery after hours.

The idea of sneaking around like cat burglars was at once thrilling and nerve-wracking. How in the world were they going to steal the
nactka
out of the Dufae box?

* * *

Louise returned to the gift shop to find that Jillian had picked out a souvenir slickie on the Alpha Centauri exhibit. Louise never saw the point of slickies. They weren’t connected to the Internet, so there was no way to share the data. They were barely indexed, so finding anything was a pain. And they often cut costs by making photos two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional with panning and rotation. She supposed that it allowed you to give something tangible as a gift instead of giving the “ethereal” download of a real book.

“You want that?” They’d planned on getting something in a box that was approximately the same size as a
nactka
, just in case they needed to get one through security the day of the robbery. Of course, they had to guess at the size.

“Yes.” Jillian gave her a look that said Louise was to play along even if she didn’t understand. Jillian held out the slickie flat on her left palm and flipped the digital pages with her right index finger. There might have been hundreds of colonists that went to Alpha Centauri, but judging by the quick flow of images, the only one that mattered was Captain Jin Wong. “It’s all videos they took of building the gate and the ships and training of the crews.” Jillian paused on the picture of Esme. Whereas the photo upstairs had shown her to be blond, this picture had her hair dyed a rich purple, the kind that only came with an expensive professional job. She hovered in midair, the Earth a blaze of brilliant blue behind her. She glared at the camera like she was going to plow it over. There was a bandage on her right temple, unexplained by the caption that read simply:
Esme Shenske, Captain of the
Dahe Hao
, during final days of her training.
“Isn’t it cool?”