by Wen Spencer
“We need to be careful to cover our tracks,” Louise stressed.
“We’ll be like ninjas.”
Their plan started to go wrong two blocks from school. They had intended to arrive early and go straight to the art rooms. As they stepped off the subway train, however, they literally ran into Iggy.
“Hi!” He grinned brightly as he patted Tesla’s head. “Today is the big day!”
They gazed at him, mystified for a full minute.
“The play meeting!” he cried. “Don’t tell me you went to that girly party and Elle sucked your brains out or something.”
They’d totally forgotten about the joint-class play meeting, even with Elle’s party. They’d spent all of Sunday researching magic.
“We have other things going on,” Jillian said.
“Finishing the newest video?” Iggy asked. “I saw the filler you put up on Friday.”
Strange how it was easier to lie to strangers than to people who might remotely be their friend. Could Iggy be considered that? Having gone through the process so few times—say never—Louise wasn’t totally sure of the steps. It seemed for something so important there should be some ritual—a declaration of intent or a solemn vow or at least a handshake. How could people keep track otherwise?
“Yes, another video,” Jillian lied, but added truthfully, “The girls at the party kept asking what the next one was about.”
“We—we had an accident in our studio,” Louise countered to explain why they weren’t going to be producing said video anytime soon.
Jillian made a face but after a moment of thought nodded. “We kind of burned it down.”
“Kind of?”
“Well, we blew it up first, and then it burned down,” Louise said.
Iggy giggled. “Blast it all?”
“Yeah, exactly!” Louise said. It felt good to admit that much of the truth. “So we’re trying to figure out how to finish the project.”
Louise started them toward the school. Jillian could keep Iggy distracted while she went to the art rooms alone. On Mondays, Mr. Kessler had hall duty on the first floor. Mr. Kessler unlocked the art rooms and left them open on the expectation that Miss Gray would arrive shortly. Since Miss Gray didn’t have a class until second period, though, she tended to arrive at school at the last possible moment. It was a habit that the twins were counting heavily on.
They stopped at the corner to wait for a walk light. Iggy seemed focused on petting Tesla, so Louise pulled out her tablet and activated her tracking program for their art teacher. Miss Gray was still at her apartment, running about in frantic circles as if she kept forgetting things in her bedroom as she tried to get out the door on time.
“You know Tesla’s not real.” Jillian kept Iggy’s attention as the walk light turned white and they started to cross.
“Doh!” Iggy laughed and then blushed and glanced around to see if any of the kids from their school were nearby before confessing, “I love stuffed animals.”
“And?” Louise couldn’t see how the two related.
“My parents don’t think boys should play with stuffed animals. They’re too girly because they’re too cute! Boy toys have to be fierce and strong. My parents won’t let me have any stuffed animals, but I can have robotic ones, because they’re robots.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jillian said.
“Welcome to my life.” Iggy patted Tesla’s head. The robot completely ignored it. “My mom won’t let me have any pets, either. She calls hamsters and guinea pigs ‘livestock,’ which is kind of funny because they got me this really cute ox.”
“Ox?”
“I’m a metal ox.” Iggy patted his chest. “I’m logical, positive, and filled with common sense, with all feet firmly planted on the ground.”
Iggy was several months older than they were, since they were Tigers, which came after Ox. Louise had never considered the accuracy of the Chinese Zodiac before, but it seemed like a good description of Iggy.
Jillian laughed. “All four feet firmly planted?”
Iggy grinned at the jibe. “We consider it being pragmatic. Others see it as obstinate.”
“So your robotic ox.” Louise measured possible ranges of sizes with her outstretched hands. “How—how big is it?”
“Bonk is just a little thing.” He demonstrated with his hands barely a foot apart. “He’s so cute!”
“Bonk?” Jillian said as they hit the door. Louise prepared to slip away as her twin held Iggy’s interest.
“He has depth-perception issues or something.” Iggy illustrated by tapping his palm against his forehead. “He makes this noise when he runs into things head-first. When he does it he makes this sound kind of like ‘baa’ crossed with ‘moo.’ I think they may have given him some goat programming.”
“Baaamoo?” Jillian attempted as Louise started her feint toward the girls’ bathroom to explain why she was walking away unannounced.
“No, not like that.” Iggy made a very cute “booonnnk” noise.
“Louise! Jillian!” Zahara came bursting through the door and spotted them in the hallway. “I’m so excited I could barely sleep. I didn’t tell you, but I want to be a pirate!”
“Shiver me timbers!” Iggy cried. “Are ye three sheets to the wind?”
“Arrr, ye scurvy dog!” Zahara cried back. “Are ye blind in both eyes? I be a corsair out of Barbados and the greatest pirate queen that ever sailed the seven seas!”
Jillian’s eyes widened and she glanced to Louise for help, completely destroying any chance that Louise could slip away. “There’s—there’s no pirate queen in Peter Pan.”
Zahara laughed. “I know, but there should be. Maybe we can rewrite parts of it.”
Jillian’s eyes went a little wider. “They won’t let us rewrite it. Not after what happened in second grade.”
“No, not you two.” Zahara grinned, her nose wrinkling with delight. “All of us.”
* * *
The morning set the pattern for the day. As hard as Louise tried, she couldn’t find a single chance to slip away unnoticed. At recess they played jump rope with Zahara. Even at lunch, where they normally sat alone, they ended up with Iggy, Zahara, and a handful of boys from Iggy’s class, all talking in pirate. By then, it was obvious to Louise that they would have to wait until the play meeting was over and forgotten before staging the raid on the art-room printer.
Jillian was not taking the delay well. She was doing a good job covering it, but inwardly she was obviously seething. “Why can’t they leave us alone?” she muttered darkly as they were herded from the lunchroom back to the fifth-grade floor.
“We’ll just do it later. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is the one day Miss Gray comes in early.”
“Then Wednesday. Or even next week. We need to find a spell that will help save the babies first.”
Jillian glared at her as Louise coded open their joint locker.
“What?” Louise whispered as Elle stopped beside them to get things out of her locker.
“I want to learn everything, not just what we need for them.” Jillian used vague terms so Elle wouldn’t understand what they were talking about.
Elle snorted, guessing wrong that they were discussing their next class. “The way you butcher French, you’ll be lucky to know enough to pass the tests.”
She yanked out her tablet and flounced away.
Louise bumped Jillian, who was about to shout something after Elle. “We’re about to yank the rug out from under her in public.” Zahara wasn’t the only girl speaking in pirate at lunch. If all the boys and at least two other girls besides the twins voted for Peter Pan, they were going to win. “Let her score points. Besides, we’re the ones screwing around in class pretending not to understand. It’s karma if people don’t know how fluent we are.”
Jillian muttered some very rude French that wasn’t in any textbook.
“We’re going to have to learn more Elvish.” Louise tried distracting her. “Dufae u
ses a lot of words we don’t know. We can use an online translator to get the basic gist, but we can’t trust it to be accurate. Everything we’ve read said that magic is as exacting as chemistry. We need to be sure we’re translating things right or it’s going to end like the flour experiment did—and we’re running out of places to safely blow up.”
Jillian harrumphed at the knowledge that they weren’t as fluent in Elvish as they were in French. “We planned that explosion.”
Louise made sure no one was nearby before whispering, “We planned an explosion, but not that one. If we screw up a magic spell, God knows what might happen.”
“There’s a reason we’re not more fluent,” Jillian said vaguely as Giselle opened up her locker on the other side of theirs. “Nicadae.”
Someone in Pittsburgh had mistranslated the phrase to “hello” without realizing that the elves were actually saying “Nice day” in butchered English. All in all, the official dictionaries were a joke, consisting of only a few thousand words of Low Elvish and pidgin commonly used in day-to-day transactions in Pittsburgh. “Nicadae” and its like were viral; all the dictionaries had the same mistake. If there was a more accurate dictionary, it had been hidden by a scientist with mad ninja skills. “We’ve never tried the University of Pittsburgh.”
“That’s because it’s only on Earth one day of the month, and that was Friday.” Jillian slammed shut their locker, and the twins headed down the hallway since their French class was about to start.
Louise groaned as she realized Jillian was right. They’d spent all Friday searching Pittsburgh’s limited Internet for a trace of Alexander and had gone to bed after midnight, frazzled and worried. They would have to wait until next Shutdown before they could hack the university’s computers.
Jillian stopped as something occurred to her and her eyes went wide.
“What?” Louise asked.
“Do you think . . . ?” Jillian threw up her hand and wriggled her fingers.
“Blast it all!” someone cried from down the hall.
Louise grabbed Jillian’s wrist and pulled her hands down. “People watch us now!” she whispered fiercely.
Jillian rolled her eyes. “Forget about it! What about us? Do you think we can?”
Could they? Were they like the queen and able to wreak havoc with a wave of the hand? The idea was thrilling, but seeing the gleam in Jillian’s eyes, Louise caught hold of her excitement and attempted to drown it under logic.
“The ninjas haven’t figured out how they do that.” Louise pointed out that the more humans understood how magic worked, the more they didn’t understand how members of Elfhome royalty created wildly powerful effects. Earth scientists were still writing papers with conflicting theories even after twenty-eight years of covertly studying the elves. Their stumbling block was the amount of energy that a noble domana-caste elf could channel. Written spells obeyed Einstein’s physics: energy output could be calculated in proportion to available magic. Of course there was the problem that the scientists hadn’t come to agreement on the nature of magic. Unlike Earth, Elfhome had an ambient magical field. It seemed pervasive as magnetism or gravity, but it was fluid in that it flowed like water, creating streams of power called ley lines. A written spell was fueled by local magic and could deplete the area of power, just like fire would use up all available oxygen in a closed system.
While the scientists couldn’t explain the source of magic, they could measure it. Windwolf had been recorded discharging energy on par with a nuclear reactor for over an hour. No human knew how he channeled so much power, and the elves refused to explain. Scientists could only secretly video the elves and attempt to figure it out.
“The ninjas are stupid.” Jillian waved away her point, doing the flourish that Queen Soulful Ember made right before she started to throw fireballs. “Since all elves use written spells on a daily basis, the ninjas are still not sure if the gesture-based spells are limited to the domana-caste or not.”
“Just because we haven’t seen a dragon, doesn’t mean dragons don’t exist.” Louise stated the logic of why the scientists were reluctant to commit to a theory.
“It’s obvious that it’s just the domana! Metal interferes with magic, so anyone who can cast spells with their hands couldn’t wear rings or bracelets. There’s not a single photo of Windwolf wearing jewelry, but all the other elves of Pittsburgh do.”
“That’s hardly empirical evidence.” Louise stated as they walked into their classroom. Everyone was still standing around talking because their French teacher, Mr. Newton, hadn’t arrived.
“I love it when Queen Soulful Ember loses it.” Giselle butted in as if they weren’t having a private conversation. Apparently she’d listened to them the whole way from their lockers. Giselle’s comment made everyone turn and look at them. As Louise wished she could go invisible, the other students joined in.
“Blast it all!” Claudia cried, hands over her head, fingers wriggling. “And then boom! How does she do it?”
“Yes, how do they do it?” Elle obviously didn’t think they knew. “Or did you just make all that up?”
“We didn’t make it up,” Jillian cried.
Louise didn’t want to draw even more attention to them, but Jillian wouldn’t back down now. “All we had to do was study videos of the elves casting spells frame by frame. They do a two-step command sequence. It’s kind of like selecting a toolbar on a computer screen and then selecting an app to run.”
Or at least, that’s what they’d observed. They hadn’t been able to find any scientific studies on the subject, even though it seemed obvious.
Jillian demonstrated the finger positions on the first command. “It’s the combination of both the position of the hand and a spoken word.” She held her right hand within an inch of her mouth. The queen always used the same first command, but Windwolf varied between two, depending on which type of spell he was about to cast, Fire or Wind.
As Jillian spoke the Fire command, Louise explained the rest.
“After the queen activates ‘the toolbar,’ she changes her hand position and uses another command word to choose which spell she’s actually going to cast from the toolbar. Each spell has a different hand position and word.”
By measuring the effects, the twins had determined that the caster then used additional hand movements to enter the spell’s area of effect in terms of direction and distance from the caster, and the amount of damage they wanted to inflict. Jillian demonstrated the queen casting a flame strike directly on top of Elle strong enough to probably reduce the entire school to ashes.
Louise turned her startled laugh into a cough. “We needed to analyze the spell-casting so we could draw it. We wanted to get it right.”
Elle looked confused. “It would have been easier to just make it up. Nobody would know.”
“We would know,” Jillian said.
“Finding out how they do it is half the fun,” Louise said.
“Être assis.” Their French teacher, Mr. Newton, commanded as he walked into the classroom. He waved at their chairs in case any of them still didn’t understand the phrase. And thus started yet another period where Louise hadn’t been able to slip away to the art room.
* * *
The play meeting was the last period of the day. They filed into the auditorium to find that the other fifth-grade class was already sitting in the front row.
With broad shoulders, square jaw, and a buzz cut, Mr. Howe looked exactly like what he was: a retired Marine master sergeant. He stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, eyeing the twins’ class as if they were unruly invaders. Miss Hamilton was laughing as usual as she gently but firmly herded them in.
She saluted Mr. Howe. “Class 501, reporting for duty, sir!”
Mr. Howe grinned and returned the salute. “Thank you, Miss Hamilton. All right, listen up, today’s mission is the joint fifth-grade class play. Today, we’re going to vote on a play . . .”
Elle’s hand shot up.
“I think we should do The Little Mermaid this year. MTI has a junior version of the script for middle school students. The cast has been enlarged to ensure parts for an entire class, and all the music has been simplified so it’s easier for kids to sing. Not that that would be a problem for me, since I take voice lessons. We can get a director’s show kit from MTI that has budgets, press releases, sample programs, cue sheets, glossary, and audition sides.”
“We would call that jumping the gun, Elle,” Mr. Howe said coldly. “I haven’t finished.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Howe. I just wanted to point out that we could get everything we needed already polished and tested.”
Louise realized that everyone was looking at her and Jillian. They hadn’t prepared a pitch for the teachers. Nor did she have any clue where to find press releases or sample programs. Every other year, teachers took care of getting what was needed after the class voted. Under the stare of their classmates, Louise put up her hand.
“Yes, Louise?” Miss Hamilton said.
“I have a play, too—when we get to nominating.”
Miss Hamilton turned to Mr. Howe. “I think we should jump to nominating, since Elle has opened the floor. We can cover the changes to how we’re doing the play this year after the vote.”
Mr. Howe considered and linked his tablet to the theater’s screen. “Okay, we have The Little Mermaid as play number one.” He wrote the title in small letters on the far left. “Louise, what’s your play?”
“Peter Pan.”
Mr. Howe grunted slightly as if surprised by the choice. He wrote it close beside The Little Mermaid. “And who else has an idea for a play?”
There was silence as everyone waited.
“Anyone?” Mr. Howe eyed his class as if disappointed that none of his students had a suggestion. “Iggy? I thought you had a play you wanted to do.”
“I want to be Captain Hook!” Iggy stated firmly.
There was a sudden chorus of “Arrrrr” and “Aye, matey!” from Iggy’s class.
“Lost Boys live forever!” one of the boys in the twins’ class shouted.
Mr. Howe and Miss Hamilton exchanged looks.