Rise of the Miser: Claus, #5

by Tony Bertauski

  Sonny’s mouth hung open.

  There were a hundred things to do with snow. You could make a snowman or a snow fort or dig an igloo from a snowdrift. You could pack snowballs, too. Kandi kept one in the freezer so there was always one around in summer.

  There was sledding and snowmobiling and snow angels and snow cones and snow sculptures and people who carved statues from ice.

  “And if you’re lucky,” she said, “you can catch one with your tongue.”

  “What does it taste like?”

  She leaned close enough to fog the glass. “Ice cream.”

  It had only been a few weeks since she had seen snow, and now she was wishing for it. She left out the part about winter and the cold that got in her bones and the dirty slush that was glued to the windshield and cemented on the driveway. How pipes would burst and cars wouldn’t start and locks wouldn’t open.

  How it was dangerous to be outside.

  Those were the things she didn’t tell him because magic dust was in his eyes. His imagination told him what snow must be like. So she told him it tasted like ice cream. It was such a harmless fib, but he was so innocent and filled with wonder. She wanted him to feel the magic.

  He’s not the one I saw at the power plant.

  She wasn’t sure what she had seen anymore, it just wasn’t him. He was too frail to leap over that ledge. He was too neat and innocent. His clothes had never seen a speck of dirt. Eggs and flour, maybe.

  Not dirt.

  SANDY WAS NEVER GOING to talk to her again.

  When the doors shut, the sandman popped off the wall with a grin so sharp she thought the top half of his head would slide off. The sandman was beaming like he’d gotten everything on his Christmas list.

  “You did it.” His stick finger darted at her and she flinched. “All the other stuff you said was killing me, but the snow...”

  He kissed his fingers as a chef might do.

  “You were there, kid. Not drilling for answers, not squeezing for information. You were just there.”

  He was right.

  Once she’d started talking about snow, the present moment wrapped its eternal arms around them and she was there. She missed the snow and never thought she’d say that.

  I miss home.

  That was the problem, though. Home wasn’t a place. She lived in Fairbanks and still didn’t feel like she was home. But the snow did. The peace, the tranquility, and Mr. Karnovsky. Isn’t it wonderful?

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

  “Don’t spoil this.”

  “Was Sonny at the power station?”

  He threw out his arms. “How should I know? I wasn’t there.”

  “Before you said it wasn’t him.”

  “Because he can’t leave the room.”

  “Can you lie?”

  “I know you can.”

  She had told Sonny snow tasted like ice cream. It wasn’t a big lie, not a damaging one. Her dad lied to protect her, but she wasn’t protecting Sonny from monsters. She’d just wanted to see him smile.

  “Are you lying to me now?” she said.

  “Define lie.”

  “Willfully telling an untruth.”

  “Your question is pointless.”

  “Why?”

  “If I’m telling the truth, the answer is no. A liar would also say no.”

  “Are you a liar?”

  He scratched his head, the twiggy fingers dragging tracks in the sand. “No.”

  “Where are we?” Kandi held up a hand. “And don’t say a hallway or standing on the floor. Where is the island located?”

  The sand dollars disappeared in a loud blink. When he opened them, he recited a long string of numbers.

  “What’s that?”

  “Coordinates.”

  “You know the coordinates... why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  So maybe he wasn’t a liar. There was really no way of knowing. But it seemed like he was telling the truth, and that was all she had to go on. She just needed to ask the right questions. She could do a search without combing through the ocean for a tiny island. If he was telling the truth, she would know exactly where she was.

  But she could search on her phone.

  “Where’s the glider?” She looked around the hall.

  Sandy stared at the empty spot where she’d left it. She hadn’t seen it since sitting down with Sonny. And now it was gone.

  “I don’t know.” He held up three twigs. “Scout’s honor.”

  The hallway was long and hot and so would be the walk to the other side of the resort. First the note from her dad went missing then her phone. Someone was playing a game.

  And she was tired of losing.

  KANDI

  14

  “Fishing is boring,” Sandy said.

  Kandi shielded her eyes. The sun was behind her, but the day was still bright. Her sunglasses were out by the pool. Along with her towel and sandals.

  “I’m not fishing,” she said.

  “You left bait by the pool.”

  She couldn’t argue. She had swum a few laps before leaving her belongings by the pool. Now she watched them from the veranda’s shadows. But she wasn’t fishing. That might be bait, but she didn’t plan on catching whoever was taking her stuff.

  She just wanted to see him.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Sandy called from the foyer.

  “How do you know it’s a he?”

  “You thought it was Sonny. I used my highly evolved artificial intelligence to figure it out.”

  She hadn’t said it was Sonny she had seen by the power plant. She said it was a person with blond hair and then she asked if Sonny ever left the room, but he had a point. He was right about one thing: fishing was boring.

  And hot.

  Daydreaming about snow was only making it worse. The excitement of describing winter to Sonny had whet her appetite, and now she yearned for a snowflake to fall on her tongue. The first snow of winter would be perfect right about now. Not one of those bone-biting blizzards, just a gentle dusting.

  The heat was squeezing the motivation out of her. First she’d hidden in the foyer—about where Sandy was now—where the shadows were darkest, but the ocean breeze seemed to die in the doorway, so she’d moved out to the veranda.

  Her dad was still scouting his next job. He’d left one of his tool bags and had taken the golf cart out to the power plant. Kandi pulled up his location. There was no map to gauge his exact location, but judging from the orientation and distance between their locations, she had a guess.

  The tower.

  He must be talking to the miser right now. That was a conversation Kandi wanted to hear, but at the moment there was an opportunity to seize. She still had his other tool bag.

  The one with the sat laptop.

  Her heart kicked into a higher gear as she slid it out. The surface was cool and sleek on her legs.

  “Ooooooo,” Sandy howled.

  “Shhh. Watch the pool.”

  “It’s so far away.” He shielded his eyes.

  She laid a towel over her legs and wiped her hands so no drops of sweat would leave a trace. She pried it open. The black screen flickered. A password was requested. A password she knew.

  Kandace2@456.

  He changed his passwords every two months. The root of his password never changed—Kandace2@4—but the following digits increased each time he did it. The last time he’d let her log on was two months ago when it was Kandace2@455.

  He wouldn’t be furious about her using the laptop—they were on an island with no connection to the outside world and she was fifteen years old with an active social media presence. He wouldn’t exactly be happy.

  She opened the browser in spy mode.

  It was better to play it safe, leave no browsing history. She wiped her hands again, careful not to lean over the keyboard when she typed.

  The response from satellite was
slow. The laptop began to warm up and the graphics loaded. Planet Earth rotated on the screen in chunky movements. She called for the coordinates and Sandy recited them. She told him to slow down twice.

  He never did.

  When she hit enter, the animated planet quickly spun and the view began its nosedive. It looked like a bird’s-eye view of a satellite crashing into the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.

  Blue was all around.

  She had expected a brown speck of an island to eventually come into focus, but when the crash landing came to a stop, it hovered over water. Not a spit of land in sight.

  Water, water everywhere.

  She double-checked the numbers, put them in again and got the same result. When she read the coordinates off, Sandy said bingo. When she held up the laptop for him to see the water-filled monitor, he shrugged.

  “Do you think she wants a satellite to find her?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  He held out his arms. “Look at this place, kid.”

  He meant the technology. It was easy to forget Sandy wasn’t real. He was just a projection. That was why he couldn’t join her on the veranda—the resort was his world, his prison. But he was smart enough to know what was going on.

  The island was remote for a reason.

  The miser wanted total and complete privacy. A hundred years ago, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but now there were satellites—the same exact ones Kandi was using—that could count the Christmas lights in Rockefeller Center. If this island could create a sandman as lifelike as the one now singing Elvis Presley...

  She leaned closer to study the waves, scrolling around until she noticed where the pattern broke. It looked like someone had Photoshopped water where the waves didn’t quite match up. She followed it with her finger and drew a circle.

  The miser is hiding it.

  Masking technology must have somehow cast an umbrella over the island. It wouldn’t be hard. If she could project a lifelike snowman in the hall, she could project the image of water over the island. At first, it didn’t make sense. She’d seen the island when they took the boat over. It was in plain sight. But there were no windows on the plane. Kandi didn’t see anything until they landed.

  I was already inside the mask.

  An icy chill raised bumps on her arms. The sky above her looked as normal as the one in Fairbanks. Fewer clouds and deeper blues but no magnetic shield trapping them inside. Is this how Sandy feels.

  Of course, that assumed he was telling her the truth. Maybe he just made up the numbers and she only thought she saw a pattern in the waves.

  She closed the tab and checked the history, just to be safe. Her dad wasn’t the paranoid type, but he’d been a little tenser than usual. Her browsing didn’t show up like she expected. The cursor went to the exit, but her finger hovered.

  That’s interesting.

  Her dad had been on the internet just last night. There was a string of searches, each of them containing variations of the same name.

  Heather Miser.

  Kandi hesitated to click one. The link wouldn’t alarm him but the time of day would. She could clear her tracks, though, one click at a time. Still, clicking out of spy mode brought back the chills. Sweat tracked down her forearm as she brought her finger down.

  It was a biotech blog.

  She’d seen this one before. Her dad had been featured in it once upon a time. He’d won some award for his work on synthetic flesh. He had advanced skin grafts with synthetic stem cells that were virtually indestructible. It was his first breakthrough in the industry and was even featured on a magazine cover.

  The year she was born.

  This entry had nothing to do with that. This was an archived post from long before he was ever featured, about a company in biotechnology.

  Avocado, Inc.

  It was still around, although their innovation and production had been usurped by current giants in the biotechnology industry. At the time of the posting, they were the pioneers that broke the field open. Having once been known for cool phones and watches, they’d shifted the mission statement to focus on health care. Synthetic stem cells were their greatest achievement.

  “Building Better Bodies One Cell at a Time,” the blog post was titled.

  Their latest three-dimensional bioprinter had just created a kidney that was transplanted into a patient. That story was before Kandi was born. Organ printing had been expanded to build hearts and lungs. Organ donation had become a thing of the past.

  There was a photo halfway down the post of the current CEO, Jerri Mitchell, alongside the recipient of the first printed kidney. They were holding a replica of the organ and smiling. There was a third person in the photo.

  Her name was Heather Miser.

  She had blonde hair and striking blue eyes with a flashing smile. The caption said she was the leading biophysicist. Kandi scanned the post again but found nothing more about her. Jerri and Heather’s physical similarities suggested they were sisters. They weren’t twins, but they were close.

  “Hey!”

  Kandi forgot the laptop was resting on her thighs when she leaped up and caught it before it bounced on the floor. Sandy was pointing at the pool.

  The sunglasses were gone.

  She went to the top of the steps. All of her stuff was gone, the sunglasses, the sandals and towel. She ran back to the foyer and forgot her sandy friend was an illusion. Her hands passed through his stick arms.

  “Who took them? You saw him, who was it?”

  He tapped one of his eyes. It sounded like the tip of a knife on a porcelain teacup. “These are sand dollars.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  She didn’t wait for the sarcastic answer (I don’t have my glasses or it was a person) and took the steps three at a time. There was nothing at the pool—no footsteps, no leaves or dirt. She scanned the trees for openings, but the foliage was dense and unforgiving.

  She ran along the manicured lawn, searching for an escape, and wondered who mowed the grass. She ended up on the beach. Palm trees leaned over the sand.

  That was where the footsteps started.

  They were long and fresh. Someone had sprinted this way and continued up the coast. Kandi gave chase. The air was like exhaust that dried her mouth and burned her lungs. Sweat stung her eyes. The coast curved slightly. Her long view was obstructed by encroaching palm trees.

  And then the footprints vanished.

  She was hunched over, sucking hot air. The tracks made a wide sweep toward the trees and then turned straight for the water. And that was it, they were gone. Like he ran straight into the ocean.

  She wiped her eyes, desperate for a drink of water. The sun was biting the back of her neck. She searched for more tracks and was about to give up when something waved up ahead.

  Walking, she approached her towel rustling in the breeze. It hung from the saw-toothed trunk of a palm tree. There were no tracks leading up to it or away, and no paths through the forest.

  The tide was coming in and the beach was shrinking.

  Judging by the hard-packed sand, high tide would reach the trees in a few hours. She wasn’t sure how deep it would get or if she would have to take refuge in the trees if she got trapped.

  She cooled off in the surf, draping the towel over her head and walking another hundred yards before the first sandal appeared. It was standing straight up, the heel buried in the sand. The next sandal was farther up. And then the beach ended at a rocky outcropping. The end of the resort sat on top.

  Sonny’s master suite.

  From her vantage point, she couldn’t see the wide window that looked out to sea. Whoever had taken her belongings had lured her toward it.

  The sunglasses were last.

  They were buried like the sandals, the earpieces stuck in the sand and the lenses looking skyward. There was a message scratched in the sand.

  Over the seven seas and mountaintops, to the lava bottoms of the volcano slop, I’ll show yo
u things you’ve never seen. It’ll be quite a sight when we light the chimney at midnight. It’s Christmas magic, if you believe.

  She plucked the glasses out of the sand and started back the way she came.

  Someone had some explaining to do.

  KANDI

  15

  “It’s just something I say.”

  Sandy cruised alongside the glider. Kandi needed water, warm or not. She was also feeling shaky, whether that was because she hadn’t eaten all day or what she’d learned in the last hour.

  “It’s exactly what you say.”

  “I don’t know about exactly.”

  Kandi held out her phone. She’d taken a picture of the message. It was word for word of Sandy’s delightful limerick. “How would he know what you say?”

  “Lucky guess?” They passed through the noisy waterball fight. “Look, I’m the happy, gritty sandman who welcomes the guests. I’m a program, I don’t even know what it means. It’s kind of stupid, really.”

  “You’re happy?”

  “Happy. Gritty. Whatever. The point is, I don’t control what I say. Why do you say the things you say?”

  Kandi said what she felt. But why did she feel a certain way? And why did she choose the words she said? There were reasons for it, like memories and experiences, both naughty and nice, that formed her behavior—experiences she couldn’t exactly remember or explain or really understand. But she still believed she chose what to say.

  Of course, that could be the greatest illusion of all.

  “I say it to everyone.”

  “How many people have you said it to?” she said. “Besides Sonny and me.”

  The glider eased to a stop outside the master suite. Sandy’s bottom ground to a halt. He tapped his chin then pointed.

  “You’re pretty much it.”

  He followed her inside, but Kandi told him to leave. She needed a shower, and despite being artificial, she didn’t want him around. Once cool and clean, she sat down to eat an apple and wrote out the message. Looking at her phone, she printed the words on a lined sheet of paper.

  “Over the seven seas and mountaintops”—Sandy was looking over her shoulder—“you’re not doing that without a plane.”