Wood Sprites

Louise looked down out of habit and nudged Jillian before she realized that she didn’t really know if he understood or what he thought. The twins were at the museum to plan a robbery to save their baby siblings. Until a month ago, they didn’t even know the names of the spaceships or any of their crew. Surely there was little common ground between her and this boy that worshiped Jin Wong, even if her genetic donor was a spaceship captain in her own right.

Louise looked back up at Esme. Don’t care a rat’s ass if anyone noticed or not. That’s how she had to be. Fierce and determined. They were going to war. Everyone better stay out of their way.

Only pretending to look at the rest of the Alpha Centauri exhibit, Louise focused just on the building. The hallway was one long, wide, vaguely boot-shaped corridor. There were only two openings, the toe into the reptile exhibit and the cuff into stair tower that faced West 77th Street.

According to e-mails between curators, it would take a week for the colony exhibit to be packed up and shipped to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The space would be cleaned as the Elfhome exhibit arrived from the Australian Museum in Sydney. The AMNH had scheduled a week to unpack and arrange the incoming display cases. During that time, Dufae’s chest would arrive from Paris, escorted by an assistant registrar. On June fourteenth, the exhibit would open to the public.

At the end of June, the frozen embryos would be thrown away.

It gave them less than a month between the time that Dufae’s box arrived in the United States and the last possible day to save their siblings. That narrow window opened in approximately twenty days. They had to be ready to slip into that opening and take what they needed.

At the end of the gallery, they continued through to the primates and then circled around through the North American birds, the New York State mammals and city birds and finally down through the African mammals to end up where they’d started. In the loop, the twins documented the two flights of stairs, the three elevators, the up and down escalators and the only restrooms on the floor. Since the access routes were grouped together into two tight knots, they only represented two main ways up to the level. A close examination of the map, however, showed that only one went all the way down to the lower level and access to the subway.

So while Jillian kept Aunt Kitty busy in the gift shop, Louise quickly mapped the second and first floors with Tesla. She noticed how many guards were walking around and the care that the staff was taking checking bags coming in and out of the museum. Even in the middle of the week, with the recent bombing canceling all school trips and most people’s travel plans, there were hundreds of visitors scattered among the floors. The twins couldn’t hope to set up the generator, open Dufae’s box, take out what they needed and get it locked again without a visitor seeing them. Obviously they were going to have to stage the robbery after hours.

The idea of sneaking around like cat burglars was at once thrilling and nerve-wracking. How in the world were they going to steal the nactka out of the Dufae box?

* * *

Louise returned to the gift shop to find that Jillian had picked out a souvenir slickie on the Alpha Centauri exhibit. Louise never saw the point of slickies. They weren’t connected to the Internet, so there was no way to share the data. They were barely indexed, so finding anything was a pain. And they often cut costs by making photos two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional with panning and rotation. She supposed that it allowed you to give something tangible as a gift instead of giving the “ethereal” download of a real book.

“You want that?” They’d planned on getting something in a box that was approximately the same size as a nactka, just in case they needed to get one through security the day of the robbery. Of course, they had to guess at the size.