Wood Sprites - eARC

by Wen Spencer

  Their dad was at least standing on the floor, his back to the wall, looking terrified while trying to seem in control.

  Louise felt guilty. It had never occurred to them that their father might be scared of snakes too.

  Her entrance line was “What happened?”

  Jillian glanced up and managed not to grin ear to ear with triumph. “I dropped the box,” she did a little voice waver of distress. “Wiggly got loose.”

  “Oh no!” It was Louise’s scripted last line. At this point she was supposed to bravely pick the snake up and put it back in the box. She scanned the room but the python was nowhere to be seen.

  They had rehearsed “the distraction” in their bedroom with a rolled-up towel cord standing in as “Wiggly.” They’d discovered they couldn’t contain Joy anywhere; somehow she escaped from everything they put her into. With her loose, they couldn’t practice letting the real snake loose and catching it again. Somehow they’d overlooked the fact that the python might actively attempt to escape. The videos they’d watched on handling big constrictors all featured very slow-moving snakes.

  She glanced questioning to Jillian, who shrugged and spread her hands.

  “Louise,” their father’s voice cracked. “Get the snake and put it in the box. Please! Now!”

  “Okay,” she said to at least seem like she was obeying him. She dropped down to hands and knees to peer under desks and behind filing cabinets. So many places it could hide.

  “Is it poisonous?” one of the men sitting on a desk asked.

  “No, it’s a constrictor.” Jillian joined Louise on the floor. “They kill their prey by coiling around it and choking it to death.”

  The man had been extending his foot down, and he paused, freezing in place. “Kill its prey?”

  Where was the python hiding? There were many nooks and crannies, but most of them Jillian would have seen the snake moving across the floor to reach. The box canted sideways marked where Jillian dropped it. The desk that Laura Runkle was standing on, still screaming, was next to it. Just beyond the desk was a door marked “Masturbatory Chamber.” She had a weirdly strong feeling that the snake must have slipped unnoticed into the room beyond.

  Her father let out a yelp as she opened the door and stepped into the room.

  The snake was on the floor, as she had expected, coiled in a pair of men’s pinstripe trousers. There was a businessman perched on a table, clutching a magazine to his front.

  “No! No! Don’t come in!” the businessman cried.

  And her father snatched Louise up and carried her out of the room.

  “I need to get the snake.” She squirmed in his hold.

  “I will get it,” he said firmly.

  “But—but—” She didn’t want to say he was scared of it, but obviously he was.

  “I will deal with it.” He caught Jillian by the shoulder as he walked past her and pulled her in his wake. He carried Louise all the way to the back of the warren of cubicles and sat her down in a chair. “Stay here.”

  A minute later he returned looking ashen but holding the box.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Louise said. “I didn’t know you—you didn’t like snakes.”

  “I grew up in rattlesnake country. I know that they’re not the same, but fear is not always rational. I’m sorry, I know you want a pet, but Daddy just can’t deal with the idea of a snake in the house.”

  * * *

  Tesla kept faltering as they backtracked to the pet store, returned the snake, and made their way to the subway. She had forgotten to turn off the magic generator. She was afraid he was breaking down but she didn’t want to call attention to it. If their father decided he could troubleshoot Tesla, he might find all her changes to Tesla’s programming and the nactka in his storage bin.

  Luckily just as they reached the stairs down to the subway, their father’s work called and he wasn’t able to push off their demands.

  “Let me put my kids on the express and then I’ll be back.”

  He kissed them both on top of their heads. “Go home. Straight home. I’ll be tracking Tesla and will be worried until I see he’s home.”

  Jillian barely waited for their father to be out of earshot. “You got it?”

  Louise nodded, watching Tesla’s head twist and turn. The subway train came rumbling in and the robotic dog shuddered and pressed up against her.

  “Come on, boy.” She patted the wide shoulder. “Keep it together until we get home.”

  If Tesla broke down before then, they were going to have a complete mess on their hands. There was no way they could abandon such an expensive machine on the subway system, but if they had to call their parents, they could discover everything.

  She pulled Tesla toward the subway train and, as the door opened, dragged him on board. “Just a little longer, Tesla. Please. We need to get home.”

  * * *

  By the time they hit their stop, Tesla was walking in a wavering line, drifting this way and that on the sidewalk. As they neared the house, she stopped being worried about getting home, and started to feel bad for the robotic dog. What if they’d totally broken him so he couldn’t be fixed? She thought she would be happy to be free from an ever-present spy, but the idea of him going away completely was making her eyes burn.

  At the corner of their street, he came to a complete halt.

  “Tesla!” she cried.

  “Stupid dog.” Jillian caught him by the collar and tried to pull him toward their house.

  The dog flinched. “But it’s so big!” he said in his Christopher Robin’s voice. “It just keeps going and going. And where is this home we’re going to? How far away is it?”

  “Tesla?” Louise said.

  He cocked his head. “What? We think it’s a reasonable question. We want to stop and see something. Everything is so interesting but we keep on moving! Why can’t we stop here and look, just for a minute?”

  “Oh. My. God,” Jillian whispered as Louise stared open-mouthed at the dog.

  There was a movement in her pocket and Joy poked her head out. “Strawberry.”

  Tesla cocked his head down at the baby dragon. “Hello.”

  “Hello!” Joy patted the great nose inches from her. “Who’s there?”

  Louise took a deep breath as she remembered that Joy had said the same phrase in the storage room as she pointed at the vial holding the babies. “Oh.”

  “We think our name is Nikola Tesla.” He tilted his head the other direction. “Or that might be just my name and—and the others have their own names. We’re not in agreement about that.”

  26: A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY

  Nikola Tesla explored their room, clumsily handling everything with his awkward dog paws. They rescued their tablets, the lamp on the nightstand between their beds, their alarm clock and their matching china piggy banks. Nikola Tesla paused to examine his front feet. “Why do our hands look like this?”

  “Because you’re a dog,” Jillian said.

  “We are?”

  “Well, at the moment, you are,” Louise said. “It’s complicated.”

  Which seemed to be the theme for their life lately.

  Nikola tried to pick up their camera and nearly dropped it. Louise yelped and snatched it out of his paws. He gazed up at her with puppy dog eyes. “We want to look at it.”

  Louise was sure April Geiselman would label this as karma. They wanted their baby brother and sisters so bad, and now they had them, with all the chaos that implied. How, though, mystified Louise. Somehow magic had weirdly combined the frozen embryos and the robotic brain of Tesla. It seemed impossible but there was no denying that Nikola was a whole different creature than their nanny-bot.

  Louise held the camera down to Nikola’s eye level and wondered how differently he might be seeing the object. “It might break if you drop it. Let me hold it while you look at it.”

  “So, you’re a boy?” Jillian moved around the room, putting treasures away while Louise kept the d
og—puppy—boy—babies—distracted.

  Tesla peered closely at the camera, tilting his massive head back and forth. “What’s a boy?”

  Jillian gave Louise a pleading look for her to answer the question. Louise shrugged; she had no idea how to explain when the person in question lacked any reasonable body parts.

  Jillian tugged at her hair in frustration. “A boy is—someone who is not a girl.”

  “What is a girl?”

  “We’re girls.” Louise tried to head off that route of questioning.

  “Well, then, we must be a boy, because we’re not you.”

  “That works,” Jillian and Louise agreed.

  Nikola was distracted from the camera by the snow globe of the hyperphase gate in orbit over Earth. (The Elfhome one was the first thing Jillian put up out of reach.) He gave a little “oh” of amazement when the glitter swirled. Louise struggled not to snatch the globe out of his hands. She really didn’t like it that much; it still felt vaguely dangerous to her for some reason. She supposed it could be worse; there could be four babies fumbling through the twins’ belongings, in mass confusion.

  “What are we going to do?” Louise whispered to Jillian. “Mom and Dad are going to freak if they find out. And they will, if he keeps talking.”

  “We’ll tell them we figured out how to upload a personality and we chose Christopher Robin. Nikola, can you say, ‘silly old bear?’”

  He tilted his head with confusion. “Silly old bear?” He had a perfect Christopher Robin lilt but the intonation was wrong.

  “No, no. Silly old bear.” Jillian gave the correct tone of an older person addressing a child.

  “What’s a bear and why is it silly?”

  “We are so screwed,” Louise whispered.

  “We can work with this,” Jillian said.

  “But what about tonight? We can’t leave him alone!” She was imagining all sorts of awful things like him getting out of the house and getting stolen.

  “We can’t take him to the gala.”

  “What’s a gala?” Nikola asked.

  They stared at him with slight horror.

  “It’s a party to raise money for some charity.” Louise attempted to define it in words that he might understand. “People get dressed up fancy, and there’s music, and pretty decorations, and—” Actually she wasn’t completely clear what the gala was going to be like, so she fell back to the parties of Jane Austen. “People dance and say snarky things to each other and there’s food and…”

  “Food?” Joy woke up and joined the building disaster.

  “Oh, now you’ve done it.” Jillian sighed.

  “I’m hungry!” Joy cried.

  “You’re always hungry, you bottomless pit.” Jillian opened the lowest drawer where they’d hidden all of Joy’s food. “Oooooh, you’ve eaten everything!”

  “So hungry!” Joy clambered into Louise’s arms and gazed up her pleadingly. “Open can!” She made the sound of the can opener. “Yummy, yummy stinky food in can!”

  Louise wished she knew how much Joy was supposed to eat. Was she actually starving like she seemed or was she just pigging out? She didn’t seem to be getting any fatter. After she’d eaten her fill, she would sleep for hours. “We should feed her before Mom and Dad get home.”

  They moved to the kitchen since Joy was a messy eater. Jillian spread out paper towels for Joy to stand on as Louise used the can opener to open up the organic cat food that they had bought for the baby dragon. Joy sat on her haunches and clapped her hands together. Nikola watched with interest.

  “Gimme!” Joy cried the moment that the can was open, releasing its pungent smell. She grabbed fistfuls of dark moist meat and shoved it into her mouth as quickly as she could shovel it in.

  “Do you think we should move her to baby food?” Jillian asked.

  Louise shrugged. They’d started with little three-ounce cans with pull-top lids that Joy mastered after they opened the first can in front of her. During the night she raided the kitchen and left the empty cans all over the floor. They’d moved to the twelve-ounce cans, which meant the little dragon was eating nearly a quarter of her weight in one sitting. “She likes these.”

  “Nom, nom, nom,” Joy mumbled around the mouthful.

  “Why is she putting it in her mouth?” Nikola asked.

  How did he know it was her mouth and not know about food? It made Louise’s head hurt.

  “It’s yummy.” Joy held out a handful to him. “But stinky.”

  “No!” The twins both cried and leapt to intercept Nikola’s attempt to eat the food.

  “That’s dragon food,” Louise said.

  Nikola eyed the half empty can. “It says ‘cat food,’ not dragon.”

  He can read the word “food” but not understand it? Louise glanced at the clock. They had exactly one hour before this became a complete disaster.

  “Nikola, do you understand danger?”

  He tilted his head to the right and then to the left. “Danger is when the primary target is in an area that might harm the primary target.”

  That sounded like robotic logic. Louise supposed that if Nikola could move the dog’s body and talk over its speakers, then the full robotic brain could also be accessed.

  “Until we tell you otherwise, only talk to Jillian and me.”

  “Joy!” the baby dragon cried, waving her hand to be included. The hand held food that dribbled through her clawed fingers.

  “And Joy.” Louise supposed Nikola might be able to teach Joy more English. So far she seemed only interested in learning words that got her more food. “If you really need to say something to us, and there’s someone else there, you need to say ‘Tut, tut, it looks like rain.’”

  “Tut, tut, it looks like rain,” Nikola quoted solemnly.

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s only a thirty percent chance of rain.” Nikola complained.

  “We’re so grounded.” Jillian sighed.

  * * *

  They washed out the empty cat food can so it wouldn’t smell, buried it deep within the trash, ran the range exhaust fan and sprayed the kitchen with air freshener. Joy needed to be washed carefully and she squirmed like an earthworm as they tried soaping her up and spraying her down in the kitchen sink.

  “Just hold still!” Jillian cried.

  Joy stuck out her tongue at Jillian.

  After they were all dried off, they went back upstairs to get dressed for the gala and plan for their parents arrival. Nikola followed them up, murmuring Christopher Robin lines that they’d taught him and complaining.

  “Tut, tut, it looks like rain. It still doesn’t make sense. Silly old bear. But what bear? You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. That one at least makes sense.”

  * * *

  Louise stared at the mirror, trying to gain confidence to actually leave the house. She felt like everyone was going to be looking at them, knowing the impossible and illegal things that the girls had been doing the last few days. Stealing magical artifacts from a museum. Baby dragons. Robotic dogs possessed by unborn siblings. She wanted the comfort of knowing that she and Jillian were drawing attention because they were cute and not because people knew. Jillian looked cute and they were twins. It stood to reason that Louise must be just as cute. All she needed to do was believe.

  “We should just leave him here,” Jillian said as Louise tied a big yellow bow onto Nikola.

  “No! We have to take him.” Louise’s whole insides went queasy at the idea of leaving their little brother behind. “It’s part of having a baby; you can’t leave them alone just because it’s inconvenient. Something might happen to him.”

  “We were going to put him in the time capsule in the back of the closet.”

  In truth, they had only given a little thought about where they were going to store the nactka once it was loaded. It seemed unlikely that Nikola would be safe in the back of the closet for years and years. The plan seemed so so
lid until it hit that “and then what” gray zone. Tesla wasn’t really a good compromise. They needed to do more, but until then, they needed to take care of Nikola like he was a real baby.

  And real babies had to have someone with them all the time.

  Tesla would just have to be added to the list of things they had already planned to take. Speaking of which, she needed to pack them. They needed to take their tablets and the gossamer calls they made. The magical whistles were hidden with all the other things related to the Codex. She shoved the calls into their purses, and then in a near panic, added the flash drive and photographs.

  “If we take Nikola, we’ll end up having to take Joy too.” They weren’t sure what taking the magic generator out of Nikola would do. Until they could carefully test it, they’d have to keep one running inside the nanny-bot while the other recharged. So far, they hadn’t been able to separate Joy from the generator, which made them suspect that she needed magic to thrive.

  “Gala food!” Joy cried.

  Leaving Joy at home seemed even worse than the idea of somehow leaving her behind. “No. We all go. We’re a family.”

  * * *

  The trick, however, was to get Nikola to the gala at the Waldorf Astoria without their parents noticing. By secreting him in the car before their parents got home and careful redirection from the parking garage to the gala, they were able to keep him quietly following behind, unnoticed. He was being good, although part of it seemed to be that he was overwhelmed by everything. He kept twisting his head, trying to see everything.

  When they checked in, however, one of the women manning the ticket window glanced beyond their parents and said, “Oh, that’s not really real, is it?”

  As their parents turned, Jillian threw both arms around Nikola and grinned brightly. “No, he’s not real. He’s our nanny-bot.”

  “What is he doing here?” their mother cried while their father looked too surprised to speak.

  “He’s going to record us all together!” Jillian cried. “We both want to be in the picture—you can’t tell we’re twins if we’re not in the shot together. And we never have any video with Daddy in it when we’re together.”