Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  “Esme.” Jillian gestured toward the secret room as if their genetic donor was hidden within it, handing out secret documentation like the French Resistance. “As we can see, the estate is mindboggling large for this close to New York City. Ming must have bought the land from Native Americans with glass beads, as there’s no evidence that it ever changed hands on the county records.” Jillian pointed to a satellite map on her tablet. It showed a paved walking trail through a public park. “We’ll need at least fifteen minutes to get from this bedroom to this trail.” She slid her finger several inches down the winding path line to the park’s parking lot and then across a busy street to a small collection of buildings. “This small strip mall is the nearest public building. I figure it would take us an hour to walk there. We could arguably call a taxi to pick us up there and take us into town. It’s ten miles as the crow flies to the nearest train station, River Edge, but that’s up and down fairly steep hillsides and across the Hackensack River. We’ll have to stick to the sidewalk, and that adds another four to five miles to our hike.”

  So half a day to walk to the nearest train station since Louise didn’t think she could walk fifteen miles without breaks. They would need to cover the distance before the secret elves noticed that they were gone. If the twins left immediately after breakfast, however, they would just be reaching the train station at lunchtime, which they normally ate with Anna. They’d be missed, and the elves would probably check all logical points of transportation. Leaving after lunch created the same scenario, only dinner being the trigger. If they left in the evening, they might miss the last train. Two little girls out in the middle of the night would draw instant attention. Even the hour’s walk to get a taxi was full of danger. This would all be so much easier if they were just adults!

  They probably would have to figure out alternate transportation. Something clever and unexpected. In prison movies they used laundry trucks, but the secret elves washed their own linens. Louise started a checklist of things they would need. It seemed massively overwhelming, but at least Jillian wasn’t huddled in bed, crying.

  “I’ve devised four exit routes from this room to the sidewalk, depending on time of day.” Jillian poured out M&Ms onto the blueprint. “In the mornings, Nattie is in the kitchen along with Celine. Ming and Anna are in their suites in the east wing.” She slid red M&Ms to mark the locations of the adults. “And the rest are scattered among the outbuildings.” She placed four green M&Ms in the west wing. “And we’re here.”

  She flicked a 3D-rendered model to Louise’s tablet. “These are the four exits. That door.” She pointed at the hallway door. “The bathroom into Lain’s bedroom and then out into the hallway again. I’ve discovered that Esme actually hinged the plywood over the real windows.” She pointed at the false wall of the secret room. “There’s climbing equipment that we can—”

  “Candy!” Joy abandoned nibbling on the paper hat to frantically snatch up the M&Ms. “Nom, nom, nom!”

  “Joy!” Jillian cried. “That’s mine! I was saving those!”

  Escape planning was paused while Jillian and Joy frantically ate the candy until both looked like chipmunks with stuffed cheeks.

  “What’s the other ways out?” Louise asked once the M&Ms were gone.

  “Mmm.” Jillian pointed at Joy while chewing. The baby dragon pulled the paper hat onto her head and saluted. “Mmmhm.” Jillian swallowed. “She’s phased at least twice her mass through the false wall. I’m not sure of her limit. We could experiment.”

  “Let’s keep that as Backup Plan B or maybe even C or D.” Louise gazed at the blueprint, feeling uneasy. If they could wait the twenty-seven days to the next Shutdown, fleeing to Pittsburgh would be simple. But she knew they couldn’t wait that long. They had to go soon. “Who the hell came up with the stupid idea of having Shutdown once a month? Why not days on Elfhome and nights on Earth, or something sane like that?”

  Nikola took it as a serious question. He tilted his head as he announced, “That was actually one suggested schedule, but the elves rejected it. They proposed that Pittsburgh would visit Elfhome only once a year. Pittsburghers advocated that the city would go through Startup and Shutdown once a month, staying on Elfhome for forty-eight hours every thirty days. The UN chose the current schedule as a compromise.”

  Compromise? The UN must be using some new definition of the word where neither party got anything they wanted.

  If the UN “arbitrarily” set the cycle of Pittsburgh being stranded for a whole month, then it meant Ming really chose the timing. If Louise had to guess, he wanted to drive away the two million humans living in the metropolitan area. It was one thing to live in a city that occasionally visited another world, and quite another to be stuck there three hundred and fifty-three days out of the year. With one manipulation of the treaty terms, Ming made it so the humans fled Pittsburgh, leaving the city short of skilled manpower. People chosen by Ming could then be positioned on Elfhome.

  For a moment, the scale of what was against them overwhelmed Louise. So much stood against them. Ming and all his people here at the mansion. His people in the EIA. The oni hidden among the humans. Elves like Sparrow. She wanted to reach out and take Jillian’s hand, but she knew that her twin wouldn’t be able to take her leaning on her. Not yet. Jillian was getting her feet under her, but she couldn’t be strong for Louise. In the very same way, Louise knew that she couldn’t go to Anna and tell her all the things she suspected of Ming. Esme, no doubt, had tried. When her mother wouldn’t listen, Esme had painted all her furniture black, built her secret lair, and woven complex plans.

  “In my dream, he found you when you were much too young. Too small. Too helpless.”

  Louise clung to memory. Esme knew that they would be caught and had left a secret hoard of weapons. They weren’t completely alone. If they could get to Elfhome, then they would have Alexander and Windwolf.

  “They’ll finish the work on Lain’s bedroom tomorrow.” Louise circled back to the real threat. “All they really have to do is put up curtains and move in furniture.”

  “How does it look?” Jillian asked.

  Louise threw up her hands. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I want to see.” Jillian headed for the bathroom that connected the two bedrooms.

  “Why?”

  “It’s like a movie set that we had built.” Jillian opened the door and gasped. “Oh, Lou, it’s going to be beautiful.”

  She walked to the center of Lain’s bedroom and spun slowly, arms outstretched.

  The floor was now a deep warm black and the walls were a rich creamy gray. Dovetail had hung a new chandelier that was a wonderful cascade of silver branches and crystals.

  “It’s going to be done,” Louise grumbled. “When they finish, Anna will want to redo Esme’s room. If they start tearing out everything, they’ll find the secret room.”

  Louise had had uneasy dreams all week of Esme frantically giving orders as workers dismantled her spaceship around her. While Louise believed that the nightmare had actually been her own fear that Esme’s bedroom would be torn apart, she felt more and more sure that something horrible had happened to Esme in the cold darkness of space. While Louise still couldn’t think of Esme as “mother,” she’d begun to think of her as something like an aunt or a much older sister. It made her sad to think that Esme might have died painfully years before they were even born.

  The question remained, though, why. What was Esme trying to do, arranging for children to be born and then leaving Earth? Whatever Esme had been attempting, it had been important enough that Esme had been willing to die trying to succeed. Had she succeeded or failed? Certainly lives had been at stake. Maybe even worlds.

  But they didn’t have the luxury to worry about worlds right now. They had to protect the babies and Joy.

  “We won’t let them remodel.” Jillian sounded like her normal self for once. “We’ll tell Anna that if she changes the bedroom, we’ll lose the only thing we
have of Esme.”

  It might work. It was probably why Anna hadn’t changed the room in the first place. But if Ming had already left for Elfhome, how soon would he want Anna and the twins to join him? How much time did they really have? It felt like a very short time.

  The bugging software that Louise had on the mansion’s phone indicated an incoming call. Since she’d set it up, there hadn’t been any calls, which made her think she’d bugged an inactive line. After careful checking, though, she’d discovered that the secret elves avoided most lines of communication. It put the meeting at the museum in a new light: the secret elves didn’t call someone when they wanted to talk.

  She tapped an icon so they could listen to the rare conversation. Rapid-fire High Elvish spilled out of her tablet. She only recognized a handful of English words thrown in, referencing technology that elves normally didn’t have access to. Cargo ship. Overhead crane. Ammo. Someone had the unfortunate job of telling Yves about the fire in the South China Sea. The news was not being taken well. There was a thunderous noise and then silence.

  “I think we got their attention,” Louise said. “Let’s take everything they have while they’re trying to put out that fire.”

  “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 . . .”