by Wen Spencer
“So some of you already discussed this?” Miss Hamilton said.
“We want to do Peter Pan,” Zahara said.
“The Little Mermaid,” Elle and Giselle cried.
“Let’s vote. All for The Little Mermaid?”
All the other girls except Zahara and Nina from Mr. Howe’s class put up their hands. It was a depressing show of hands. Mr. Howe and Miss Hamilton both counted, and once they were sure, Mr. Howe wrote the total on the board.
“Hands up: Who wants to do Peter Pan?”
They counted and then counted again.
“All right. It’s Peter Pan.”
A cheer went up, and Elle visibly struggled not to pout. Somehow, though, Louise felt like they hadn’t won.
“Settle down. We have lots to go over yet. Louise, do you have a scene and cast list for the play?”
“I do.” Jillian raised her hand but started to talk before either teacher called on her. “There are five acts, the first and last are both in the nursery, so we would need to build four sets. For the nursery, we only need three beds and a window. It can be very Our Town-like. The second set is the forest of Neverland, the third is the mermaid lagoon, and the fourth is Hook’s pirate ship.”
“I think it would be cool if we did a Kansas/Oz comparison between the real world and the fantasy world.” Louise defaulted to set design. “Do the nursery in grays or neutrals. The original set design had details that stressed how poor the Darlings were and outside the window were treetops to give the impression of skyline seen from an attic room. We could modernize it by having a brick wall as backdrop with graffiti and maybe use a flickering light and sound to make it seem like trains are passing by.”
“So the forest of Neverland would be colorful?” Jillian asked.
“Yeah, we could do flowering trees and different shades of green for foliage of trees.”
“Sounds costly,” Jillian complained.
“The biggest challenge would actually be scene changes. They need to be quick and easy while still giving visual depth to the stage. What we might be able to do is build out something that opens and shuts like umbrellas.”
“We could get yards of fabric in different shades of green,” Zahara said. “Everyone could cut a couple dozen leaves for homework, and then, on stagecraft days, we could staple them to the umbrella rigging.”
“Girls!” Mr. Howe held up a hand for silence. “I’m glad you’re jumping in with both feet, because this is exactly how this year’s play is different from other years. The class play is a yearly exercise on working together as a team. Unlike earlier years, where your teachers would set work schedules, assign projects, and oversee the work, you will now be responsible for all of it.”
“Mr. Howe and I will simply be advisors to help you find solutions when you can’t find a way to deal with a problem by yourself,” Miss Hamilton said.
“This year, you will pick out a director, a stage manager, a costume designer, a props director, as well as assign who will get what roles.” Mr. Howe opened a new window on his tablet and wrote down “Peter Pan” and started a list of jobs.
Louise took a deep breath as their future was suddenly unveiled. As Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo, she and Jillian would be the best candidates for most of the responsibilities. The play took up nearly three months of daily work, both at school and at home. Jillian already had sold the idea of her starring as Peter, who appeared in every scene.
But their siblings were going to be disposed of in three months. They should be focusing all their time and energy on the babies. They had to make a magic generator, translate the Dufae Codex, and experiment with spells.
“I want to be Captain Hook!” Iggy put up his hand.
“Aye!” the pirates shouted.
“Captain Iggy Hook!” the Lost Boys cried.
They all cheered as Mr. Howe started the cast list with “Captain Hook: Iggy.”
“If we’re doing Peter Pan, I want to be Wendy!” Elle cried, and her friends clapped when Mr. Howe, hearing no objection, wrote it down.
“Jillian’s going to be Peter!” Zahara said.
“And the director!” Iggy added. “Louise can be stage manager.”
There was another cheer, and their names went up on the screen.
Louise sank into her chair, trying to keep dismay off her face. This was the worst thing that could happen.
It proved impossible to sneak away to the art room to use the 3D printer. Everyone wanted their attention.
Except the Girl Scouts.
As Jillian had predicted, Mrs. Pondwater didn’t take well to their coup d’état with the play. She ambushed them outside the troop meeting on Monday afternoon and politely informed them that if they wanted to stay in the Girl Scouts, they’d have to find another troop. With Nigel Reid’s appearance on the Today Show less than two weeks away, there wasn’t time to infiltrate another group and set up a field trip. They had no real guarantee that it was the real Nigel who had contacted them. If Nigel did mention them on the show, then there would be opportunities later to interact with him. Besides, it was a relief that they didn’t have troop meetings to attend on top of everything else.
Jillian was swamped with rewriting the play to more modern English and planning on how they were going to do the complex sword fights and flying scenes. Louise needed to design the sets, create a work schedule for the stagecraft period, and create a blocking mock-up on the floor of both classrooms and the fifth-grade hallway so actors could learn how to move around sets that didn’t exist yet. They also found themselves managing the other kids, who had never tackled such a large project before. They needed to help Zahara with the costumes, Reed with props, and Ava with the advertising.
With every minute of their time at school eaten up, they had no choice but to wait until stagecraft started. At that point, Louise could slip the magic generator into the work schedule. It required her to design decoy equipment into set designs.
Jillian hated the idea. She wanted to start trying out the multitude of spells in the codex. They hadn’t found anything that resembled basic magic lessons, and Louise was afraid to experiment blindly. Louise pointed out that their goal was to save their siblings, not blow up the neighborhood. Reluctantly, Jillian agreed.
Since Louise’s evenings were being taken up with finalizing the conception art for all the sets and costumes, Jillian handled the translation for the next few days.
Jillian plowed onward through text peppered heavily with completely unknown words. Dufae’s story unfolded in awkward bits and often incomprehensible pieces, such as: “I miss the moon spinners and the dark-eyed widow.” And: “I feel like a duck with a puddle. At least it keeps the house warm.” And: “What is this obsession with stone people?” And: “He shapes stone with coarse hands, rough as rock, unyielding.”
It was another day before they could translate another large section into something understandable and not a song. (At least, they thought the odd sections with what might be musical stanzas were songs and had nothing to do with magic. Maybe. Rough sketches of a kitten also started to appear in the margins, growing on each page to a slightly pudgy cat.)
I am so very lonely. Why do they put so much importance on the count of years? It disregards that some will never grow out of childish spite, and others, like myself, leap to wisdom at a very young age. If they had recognized me as an adult as I know myself to be, I would have been allowed to take as Beholden those whom I could trust completely. I would have had more options than to run and hide. The irony being that I have succeeded this much because I am still a child in their eyes. I was allowed freedom to do what no adult could—to move unwatched and unchecked through the very camp of the enemy. I worry now that my actions might have brought danger down on my parents. I can only hope that their true ignorance of my actions will guard them against attack. That I hope this in vain eats at me at night.
“I wonder how old he was.” Jillian made notes on the page and indexed it. “Not how many years old,
because elves take forever to grow up, but, you know, was he the equivalent to our age? Or was he older, like a teenager? He did get married and have a kid, but he could have been on Earth for years and years.”
“I don’t know, but whoever he was hiding from—they’re probably still alive.”
Jillian looked surprised, and then her eyes went wider as she realized the truth. “Elves live forever.”
“What he was working on might still be dangerous,” Louise said.
“Oh. Oh!” Jillian said. “His parents! They’re probably wondering what happened to him.”
It felt as if reality had shifted around them. Dufae was no longer an old person who had died hundreds of years ago, but a child who should still be alive, still young, still with his loving mother and father. On Elfhome there were people who knew his face and the sound of his voice, people who probably missed him horribly and were praying in vain that he come home safe. Or worse, what Dufae feared had happened, and the people he was hiding from had killed his parents.
“We need to be careful,” Louise whispered. “This is dangerous.”
* * *
“Oh! Oh!” Jillian leapt to her feet close to bedtime. “Listen to this!” She paused to find her place again in the translated codex and started to read. “‘I still think that I might need to open one of the nactka.’”
“What’s a nactka?”
“I don’t know. This is the first time he mentions it. But listen!” Jillian went back to reading.
“It stands to reason that since I can’t set up a resonance, opening one should be perfectly safe. If I’m cut off, the spell surely cannot trigger. Logic prevails that I should delay opening a nactka until I fully understand the nature of the spell, but I’m not sure I can grasp the spell without fully studying one.”
“Open one? So they’re like jars?”
“There’s more!” Jillian went back to reading, holding up one finger to indicate that Louise should wait.
“I don’t believe that there have been any changes made to the fundamental nature of the nactka itself. The object inside is held as if time has been stopped until the nactka is open. A flower would remain as if newly picked. Ice will not melt even in the hottest of summer. A chicken egg will not hatch for a hundred years, and yet when taken out, the chick will emerge unharmed.”
Louise gasped and then caught hold of her excitement. “But we don’t have one of these.”
“But we know they exist! Magic can save our baby brother and sisters.”
“We don’t have one, and he might not describe how to make one.”
“He had one here on Earth.”
“Three hundred years ago in Paris.”
“Grandpa Dufae has this codex and the old photographs. He might have it. I’m sure he would let us use it.”
“And he might take us away from Mom and Dad!”
Jillian waved away the objection. “He already knew there were other embryos. If he wanted more kids, he would have arranged for them to be born.”
“He didn’t have the money to pay for surrogate mothers. Esme did.”
“He gave Esme copies of all the Dufae family stuff. He must have thought she was arranging more kids to be born or something.”
They both paused and frowned as the logic of their mother once again escaped them. Why had she left the puzzle box with April? Except for the odd mystery photographs, there had been nothing of her in the box.
“They would have never made her captain if they thought she was crazy,” Jillian pointed out.
“There is that,” Louise agreed. They had to be missing some vital information that made Esme’s action logical, but so far Louise couldn’t even guess what that might be. “We need more information.”
Jillian growled in frustration and sat down at her desk and started to link her tablet to the house computer.
“What are you doing?”
“This is taking too much time. I’m speeding it up.”
“How?”
“I’m going to machine translate the entire document so we can do text searches and see everything he says about the nactka.”
* * *
Needless to say, the spells made the translation software have hissy fits.
* * *
The next entry of nactka came a hundred pages later and explained little.
It was pure childish curiosity that made me unlock the box, but I had recognized the dozen primed nactka the moment I saw them. I might be still a child, but I’d sat at my grandmother’s knee and heard all the dark stories of our enslavement. I knew that I had to act. My first thought was to merely disarm the nactka, but I was afraid I might accidently trigger whatever spell they were meant to activate. Nor would simply destroying these twelve solve the true problem. He couldn’t have made these; he lacks the intelligence and talent. Whoever created these might be able to make more. Might have already done so. These nactka pose no threat on Earth; they are inert. They remain dangerous, however, until I understand what the spell they’re linked to does.
“No, not another song!” Jillian cried as the next paragraph started out with “Knock knock, pick the lock, open the box . . .”
“Well, we know that the nactka are in a box.” Louise started a separate search. “Let’s see what he has to say about the box.”
Luckily Dufae obsessed about the box. He drew pictures of it. He considered changing the keyword of the lock spell and made elaborate notes on how to make lock spells and then decided that the magic of Earth was too “dirty” to guarantee a success.
And then they made an amazing discovery. The last few pages weren’t in Elvish but French. The hand that made the letters was more impatient, gone was the elegant perfection.
Today my wife has born me a son, and we named him Roland Dufae. His ears are as pointed as mine. I was born fifty-some years ago, but I still look like a youth. I realize that my father would have lived forever on his native world and could not imagine that his life would be cut so short in such a tragic way. I have no idea how long I will live, but I must be sure that my child knows of his heritage, for it is stamped upon his face and determines how fast or slow he may grow. I will teach him to read and speak my father’s tongue. When he is old enough to understand, I will tell him of how my father traveled to Earth from the world of elves and why. When the crown of France fell, taking my father with it, I was still an infant. I was carried to safety in America. The codex and many of my father’s things were brought with me, but the nactka that were his whole reason for fleeing his homeworld were not among them. I do not know what happened to the box containing the nactka. For his soul, I pray that they were smashed by ignorant fools, but from what I know of the box’s construction, this is unlikely. Protected as it was, it was virtually indestructible. It must exist somewhere in France along with all the crown jewels looted from the palaces. The fools will not be able to open the box, so it will continue to be, until I or one of my children search it out.”
On the next page was English done in careful precise lettering, nearly as if printed by a machine.
“My beloved grandchildren, Leo was killed by his efforts to build a gateway to Elfhome. Dufae’s enemies have been on Earth all this time. It is possible that they already have the contents of Dufae’s lost box. Stay hidden. Trust only each other and no one else. Keep yourself safe.”
* * *
How do you find a box that was lost three hundred years ago on another continent? Once upon a time, it might have been impossible, but the data age had put cameras into the hands of billions of humans, all with the curiosity of monkeys and a weird drive to share what they knew. Louise created a rendering of the box based on Dufae’s sketches and tied it to a spider to crawl through the web, comparing the image to the trillions of pictures stored on the Internet. Someone, somewhere, had to have seen the box.
May first was Alexander’s birthday. She turned eighteen, a full and legal adult. Louise and Jillian celebrated alongside her and yet a universe apart, wi
th cupcakes they bought on the way home. They risked a birthday candle because their mother was working late, stuck at work because her company needed to counterbalance growing protests with more security measures at upcoming events. The lone candle, though, reminded Louise that their baby siblings might never see a single birthday, and it made her cry.
“Make a wish, then blow it out,” Jillian choked out.
Louise wiped away tears, thinking how stupid “wishing” magic sounded. She didn’t even know what it was she needed to wish. For more time? For everyone to forget that they were supposed to be doing a play at school or that Jillian and she were shouldering a monster-load of the work? That they could find a nactka that had been lost for hundreds of years tucked away in their parents’ basement?
Somehow they needed to save their sisters and brother.
She blew out the candle, and they ate their cupcakes while searching the world for Dufae’s lost box.
* * *
“Jillian! Louise!” Zahara had bounced up beside Louise at the twins’ locker. Since Jillian had cut her hair Peter Pan-short, their classmates couldn’t tell them apart from behind. Jillian had already been sucked away to deal with some play-related emergency. It left Louise feeling horribly aware that she rarely dealt with the world without Jillian beside her. It nearly felt like she had lost her right hand. “Did you see the Today Show this morning?”
Louise gasped as she realized that it was the day that Nigel was going to be a guest. She’d forgotten in the search for the nactka. “No!”
“Nigel Reid did a shout-out to Lemon-Lime.”
“He did?” Louise cried, at once crushed that she’d missed seeing him, and yet excited at the idea that the real Nigel Reid had mentioned her and Jillian.
“He said he was a big fan. And he had Wembley with him.”
“What?” Wembley was one of their running jokes in The Queen’s Parting Gift. The Court had told the humans that the queen was giving them a “wembley” as a gift and meant at first a beautiful songbird. After the bird dies, they come up with a series of increasingly uglier animals to offer up as a wembley, that all meet bizarre deaths, until they get to a woolly-mammothlike kuesi, which are so ugly that they’ve crossed the line to cute.