by Wen Spencer
“What does he want with the bomber?” Nikola asked. “Is he going to arrest him?”
Louise glanced to Jillian. Her twin shrugged.
“I don’t think so,” Louise said.
Jillian ticked off possibilities on her finger. “Either they’re afraid that the bomber can identify them and they’re going to kill him or her. Or they want to supply them with another bomb.”
Louise didn’t think it was possible that Tristan’s presence could get more frightening but it just did. Fear was skittering around in her, urging her to run someplace to hide. They couldn’t go back home, not without having to confess more to their parents and putting Nikola at risk. “I think if he was here to supply a bomb to a mad man, Tristan wouldn’t be following us around. Anyone could do the research and deal with the bomber. Tristan is here because he can be with us all the time. Even Miss Hamilton isn’t constantly watching us. I think he may be protecting us?”
“Protecting us?” Jillian sneered at the idea.
“Anna wanted Mom to pull us out of school. Since Mom wouldn’t do that, Anna sent Tristan here to protect us.” That didn’t feel right. “Or Ming did, to stop Anna from worrying about us.” That felt more possible.
Jillian took it to its logical end. “So Tristan is looking for the bomber to kill him or her.”
The homeroom bell rang, ending their war session. Reluctantly they left the safety of the restroom. Louise wished she could find comfort in the fact that Tristan probably didn’t mean them harm, but it meant that one of the teachers or other students had already killed several innocent bystanders and might do it again.
* * *
Nikola gave the locker a dejected look and then gazed pleadingly at them. “You’ll answer our texts?”
“Yes.” Louise patted him on the head and then nudged him toward the tight dark hole. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But you’ll be safer this way.”
With a whimper, Nikola backed into the space and let them close the door on him. Louise felt horrible doing it. People went to jail for doing it to children. If the twins weren’t fifth graders, they wouldn’t have to be doing this to Nikola. If they were adults like other parents—because they were Nikola’s parents—they could be working at home or work different shifts or arrange for a nanny. With time they might be able to think of better options but there hadn’t been time.
* * *
It had been over a month since the bombing. The FBI tip line gave the official profile of the suspected terrorists.
Earth for Humans’ most vocal members were the people living in the affected zone, who stood to lose their homes and workplaces. While they would be compensated for the loss of their houses, they’d receive less than fair market price and most likely wouldn’t be able to relocate close to their work—if their job remained afterwards. There were violent debates also going on as to how wide the expansion would need to be to be effective and how uniform it could be without taking out basic support structures like major roadways, power stations, and utility right-of-ways.
Those members, though, tended to be the most levelheaded ones as they’d spent years dealing with having a hole into another universe in their backyard.
The FBI pinpointed that the subversive members were the ones who had been forced to move from Pittsburgh during the Shutdown. The treaty had specified that the elves would not have to deal with insane, criminal, or orphaned humans. The terms had been extended out to the more general definitions. People who had received treatment for mild depression, eating disorders and controllable bipolar were lumped in with dangerous psychotics. Drunk drivers were exiled with murderers. Shamed and driven out, they held a great deal of resentment against the elves.
Since the bombing, the details of Vance Roycroft’s life had been put on public display. It was a long disjointed story of disasters and bad choices. Roycroft’s childhood home had been squarely on the Rim. The first Startup had leveled the house; his father’s body had never been found. It had been assumed that his father had been shattered down to atoms when Pittsburgh had been transferred to Elfhome. His mother suffered a nervous breakdown and had been deported. Vance had been put into foster care on Earth. Roycraft’s life never recovered from that first Startup. Early brushes with the law exchanged foster care for juvenile detention centers. When he turned eighteen, he was given a clean slate. Shortly after that he’d joined Earth for Humans.
It must have been then that he was chosen to be a tool. He “started” a business importing and exporting goods from Pittsburgh. The media took it at face value since, as a native Pittsburgher, Roycroft had had the privilege of being able to come and go without having to constantly go through the visa process. Louise suspected that Ming had set Roycroft up with a strong line of credit and a list of customers. There was no other way someone could go from absolute nothing to being able to lease trucks, fill them with gas, and drive them to another world.
The authorities claimed that all the explosives had been purchased on Earth and taken to Elfhome, where Roycroft assembled it inside the packing crate for a large ironwood chest. Because of the nature of traffic out of Pittsburgh, the terrorists would have been unable to predict the exact time of delivery. For some reason, Roycroft didn’t use a cell phone as a simple trigger. Instead he’d used a fairly sophisticated AI-driven trigger that had been programmed to do detailed safety checks prior to the explosion. If it had worked properly, it wouldn’t have obeyed the command to explode before being delivered to the correct location. No wonder the authorities hadn’t considered the terrorist “dangerous” enough to try and lock down the city.
There had been a flaw, however, in the code that used the GPS coordinates range that the device used to check to see if it was properly delivered. What the designer took to be several inches in any direction actually translated to dozens of feet. A simple stupid mistake had cost people’s lives.
Roycraft had been a high school dropout with no real aptitude for technology. He couldn’t have created the trigger.
No one at Perelman fit the FBI profile. Assuming that Roycroft’s accomplices designed the trigger, then Tristan’s choices made sense. Everyone he ran background checks on could have possibly created the device. He focused mostly on the teachers who had military backgrounds. Tristan, though, was unfamiliar with the school. He didn’t realize that there was only one person with unlimited access to the one piece of equipment necessary to make the trigger: the 3D printer in the technology annex. When Louise had checked the print history a few days after the bombing, Mr. Kessler was the only teacher who had printed anything for weeks prior to her creating the magic generator.
“No. No. This is wrong. What could have happened?”
On the day of the bombing, Mr. Kessler had dashed up twelve flights, in a rush to start a program running on his desk computer. Of all the teachers, only he had been overcome with horror, unable to react. Was it because he was responsible for all the carnage he could so clearly see from the annex window? He’d carefully designed a humane bomb, one that was careful not to kill anyone, and instead he unleashed it on children.
If he had made the trigger, then the record should be in the print history.
Louise logged into the school’s administrative system via their back door and accessed the printer. It had been wiped clean. Nothing remained. The lack of evidence was just as damning.
Louise felt Tristan’s stare. She made the mistake of glancing up and meeting his eyes. He looked puzzled. She realized that her reactions to what she’d found must have shown on her face.
She ducked her head, heart pounding. Mr. Kessler was a horrible self-centered man but she didn’t want to get him killed. What were they going to do?
* * *
First period, they had their final in math. Louise raced through the questions, scribbling out the work with her stylus. She turned in the test slickie ten minutes into class.
“What? No artwork this time?” Mr. Nakagawa asked. Normally she spent the entire clas
s doodling in the margins when they had a test; it amused her that the software allowed an array of colors and line thickness.
“Can we use our tablets?” Jillian joined her at his desk. For some weird reason they weren’t allow to use their phones at school but tablets supported the same texting software.
Mr. Nakagawa flicked his fingers, indicating that they could sit down. “No talking.”
Tristan watched them with eyes narrowed, stylus poised over the questions. Surely he was just making a show at struggling with the test. He was old enough to get a doctorate degree. Why was he even taking the test? He’d only been in class for a day!
Mr. Nakagawa tapped on his desk loudly. “Eyes on paper.”
Tristan focused back on his test, answering faster than before.
The twins sat down and Louise texted Jillian what she had figured out.
“Obviously we turn Kessler over to the authorities and let them deal with him,” Jillian texted.
“We need evidence,” Louise texted back.
“We could restore the data and then send it to the police,” Nikola offered.
Louise eyed her phone. She hadn’t thought it was possible for someone to “overhear” text messages between two people, but the babies were bored. They’d obviously figured it out. “Yes, do that.”
Jillian eeped in surprise, earning a loud knock from Mr. Nakagawa. She pressed her mouth tightly shut on any other exclamations and texted furiously, “If you restore the data, the plans for the magic generator and the decoy Tinker Bell spotlight will also be restored.”
“We need to know if he made more than one trigger,” Louise typed. “There could be a second bomb.”
Jillian flinched as if hit. “Okay, okay, restore the data but don’t send to police!”
“We could delete our stuff back off,” the babies offered.
It seemed like a simple fix, but most likely the FBI would seize the printer and examine it every possible way including under the microscope because they would need evidence to convict Mr. Kessler. If the twins turned Mr. Kessler in, then the magic generator would be found. Erasing the info would only make them look guilty—guiltier.
Louise shook her head. “We need something else as evidence. Something that ties him to Roycroft or the bomb.”
Jillian leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling a moment before texting, “Maybe we could get him to confess. If he told the police that he was involved, they don’t need evidence.”
“He’ll never confess,” Louise texted. “He’d be facing a death penalty.”
“New York doesn’t have the death penalty,” Nikola stated.
“It’s an act of terrorism,” Louise texted while Jillian replied with, “It’s a federal case.”
But perhaps Jillian had the right idea.
“We could send Kessler an anonymous letter saying that if he didn’t confess to creating the trigger to the bomb on his 3D printer, that we…”
Her tablet was suddenly jerked out of her hands. She yelped in surprise as Tristan glanced at the screen and his eyebrow rose in surprise.
“Kessler?” He said it like he was only mildly surprised.
Mr. Nakagawa knocked loudly.
Tristan handed back her tablet and went back to his seat.
* * *
Flying Monkey knew.
He only glanced at her tablet for a moment. Nikola’s text had scrolled out of view. The babies were safe from him, but Mr. Kessler was a walking dead man.
Maybe. Assuming that Ming didn’t want him to make another bomb.
They had to act faster than she wanted to. Tristan had taken his own tablet out and was typing something.
“We need to restore the data on the printer,” Louise texted.
“We’re doing it,” Nikola replied.
“As soon as we get a copy we need to send it to the FBI so they’ll act now.”
“He got the printer’s memory deep-scrubbed but the programs were automatically copied to the administration system.”
Louise assumed that he’d deleted those too. “He didn’t wipe those?”
“No. He doesn’t have clearance to do that.”
Neither did the twins but that didn’t stop them. Was Mr. Kessler really that stupid that he couldn’t hack the school’s system? Or did he think that the school board simply wouldn’t understand the code that they were looking at?
She gasped as the log showed that he’d printed three triggers, one day after another, during the first week of March. According to the media, Roycroft’s business promised to deliver all packages during the next Shutdown. He could only make the guarantee because of a well-exploited loophole in the treaty that let US customs prescreen shipments and then keep them in guarded storage areas prior to Shutdown. The EIA then would do a cursory check on the seals and pass the shipments quickly through the quarantine zone. Using Roycroft’s records, the FBI had tracked all the thinly disguised bomb components to Elfhome. None of them should have gotten past the US customs, as the treaty banned them. In addition to the quarantine zone expansion, the UN was also debating closing the loophole so that all goods would pass through EIA. Since Ming controlled the EIA, then he would effectively control everything in and out of Pittsburgh.
What wasn’t clear was how many bombs had been made with the goods sent to Elfhome. The EIA paperwork claimed that Roycroft only transported one crate, but it also claimed that the crate contained a large ironwood chest. Had there been more than one bomb? Where were the other two triggers?
Louise created a temporary email account, making sure it couldn’t be traced back to them. She composed a short message that stated simply that Mr. Kevin Kessler of Perelman School for the Gifted printed the enclosed program on a 3D printer at the school to create the trigger. She hated that she hesitated at sending the message once she was done; the lives of hundreds of people might be at stake. Still, it was putting Jillian and Nikola and Joy at risk, and it scared her.
Was she doing the right thing? There was no sense of right or wrong. Pure logic said that she had to act and quickly. Steeling herself, she hit “send.” The message vanished into the Internet and she felt nothing but continued unease.
* * *
Mr. Kessler vanished that afternoon. He’d left his phone on his desk in the annex, rushed down twelve flights of stairs, careened through the seventh graders returning from lunch, and bolted out of the building. The FBI arrived an hour later with warrants. They started to dismantle the technology annex with frightening thoroughness. When they discovered the triggers in the storage room, school was hastily dismissed.
It was chaos on the street. The bomb squad was assembling outside as teachers herded out the students. Louise kept a firm hold on Tesla’s leash as the twins headed toward the subway. She hoped that they could slip away unnoticed by Tristan but he fell into step with her before they reached the station. The platform display had Mr. Kessler’s photo; it was captioned: Police search for teacher bomber; bombs found at private school.
What should Louise say if Tristan asked how they knew the bomber was Mr. Kessler? Should she admit she contacted the FBI? Did he think that she knew where Mr. Kessler went? Why was he still following them? What did he want?
They rode in strained silence to their station and got off.
As they walked down the steps to the street level, Louise realized there was nothing keeping Tristan from following them the whole way home. That they couldn’t go into their house and keep him out. It scared her and that made her angry. If he wanted to pretend he was nine years old, she’d act like he was nine years old.
She spun to face him. “Listen you stupid booger head! You’re making me mad! Are you some kind of pervert?”
“Booger head?” He took a step back, surprised by the attack. “What? I’m not a pervert!”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” She gave him a hard push. “You know what they call nasty old men who follow little girls around? Perverts! Just because you’re a little boy doe
sn’t mean it’s any different when you do it too! You’re a sick little booger head!”
Jillian gazed at them both in wide-eyed amazement.
“I’m not a pedophile!” Tristan cried.
“Neener, neener, boo, boo, stick your head in doo-doo!” Louise gave him a hard push. “Just go away. Cootie breath! Didn’t your mother teach you not to be mean to little girls? Your mother would be ashamed of you.”
Judging by the way he flinched, Anna would have been upset. Which meant that Anna didn’t know that he was there.
“I’m trying to protect you!” Tristan snapped.
“From what?” Louise cried.
Tristan pointed toward Manhattan and their school. “If you didn’t notice, there was a bomb at school!”
“And you were going to protect us how?” she shouted. “Poop on it?”
“I would have taken care of it!” Did that mean he hadn’t been the one who warned Mr. Kessler?
“By pooping and peeing on it?” Jillian realized what Louise was doing and joined in.
“Don’t be so stupid.” Tristan sounded his forty-some years. “I know you’re smarter than that. How did you know it was Kessler?”
Louise clamped shut her mouth, not sure how to answer.
Luckily, Jillian had something prepared. “Mr. Kessler hates us because we keep blowing his curve; he used to tease us during class. When we started working on the play, we had to go through him to use the printer in the annex.”
“Through?” Tristan mimed a ramming motion. “Like a plow through a snow bank?”
“Somewhat,” Jillian admitted. “He’d slipped once or twice and ranted about how much he hated elves in class. Once the FBI released the news about the trigger, Mr. Kessler was the first person we thought of.”
All mostly the truth. Convincing Tristan that they were still just normal fifth graders was probably the wisest thing to do. Louise took up the thread and started to weave out a more elaborate fabrication. “I was in the annex on the morning of the bombing. I saw him come in and trigger the bomb; I just didn’t realize it until later. After the bombing, he was really nice to us. Super nice. It made us suspicious.”