Wood Sprites

Louise checked and found that there were indeed more embryos in storage. There was a recent date on their records. She frowned and checked the code for it. “Oh no, they’ve been flagged for disposal. The company sent out a letter last month to inform the estate that if they didn’t respond, the embryos would be thrown away. No one has responded to the letter. We have six months to save them.”

3: Mundane Monday

“I think we’re lucky that our male genetic donor is dead,” Jillian whispered in art class the next day.

Louise glanced automatically to Jillian’s tablet to see what had triggered the comment. Her twin had multiple newspaper web pages up, all featuring a Boston murder case. According to the headlines, the killer’s name was John Wright, who had beaten his wife, Ada, to death. “What?”

“Leonardo DaVinci Dufae had one sister. Ada Lovelace Dufae. She married John Wright and had one son, Orville Wright.”

Louise snickered at the names. “Wow, the Dufaes have a twisted sense of humor when naming children.” DaVinci had been a scientist as well as an artist. Ada Lovelace had worked with Charles Babbage on the prototype of the computer. Orville Wright had invented airplanes with his brother, Wilbur.

“Yes, obviously our grandfather hated being Tim No Middle Name Dufae.”

“I wonder what they would have called us.”

Jillian squinted a moment. “The mind boggles. The Wright brothers are the only sibling pair of inventors that leap to mind. But Orville is our cousin, not our brother.”

“You can be Wilbur. I’ll be Jane Goodall.”

“I’ll be Marie Curie, merci beaucoup. You should be Maria Goeppert Mayer, since we’re already Mayers.”

“Marie? Maria? We have a hard enough time with people telling us apart. I’d rather be Jane Goodall.”

“Okay, monkey girl.”

“Okay, Wil-burr.” Louise giggled.

She winced as Miss Gray raised her voice. Gage was causing problems again. He really needed to be on some kind of ADHD medicine.

Jillian sighed. “I can’t find out what happened to Orville after his mother was killed.”

“Oh.” The headlines made sense now; their Aunt Ada had been murdered by her husband. “How old is he?”

“He was ten when his mother died.” Jillian pulled up a picture of a boy that looked eerily like Louise now that her hair was boy-short. His dark eyes were haunted; they spoke to her of unimaginable horrors. “He saw it happen. He’s twenty-two now. Wherever he is. Trying to find out anything about him is getting me spammed with hits on the airplane inventor. Our stupid grandfather!”

Jillian fell silent, focused on creating a more accurate genetic family tree than the one that hung over their fireplace at home. Ironically both were equally bare. Orville was their only cousin by blood or birth. Their “Aunt Kitty” was a girl that their Grandma Johnson took under her wing but never formally adopted.

Louise tapped the icon in the corner of her tablet to check on their art teacher Miss Gray, who liked to roam while her students sketched. Making eye contact would warn her that the twins weren’t working on the assignment. Normally not a good thing, but since they were hacking various computer systems, it could be catastrophic if they were caught. Louise had a monitoring application that tracked the tablet that Miss Gray usually carried during class, but sometimes she put it down. The program showed that Miss Gray was in motion on the other side of the art classroom.

Louise minimized the window and went back to chasing down leads on their older sisters’ surrogate mother, April Geiselman. She had three leads so far: one in Hawaii, one in Arizona, and one in New York. She needed to dig into their past to see if any of them had lived in Pittsburgh at some point.

The morning had been surreal agony as they went through the motions of pretending to be normal nine-year-olds. Almost everything covered in class, they’d learned before enrolling in kindergarten as four-year-olds. After a series of tests showed that they read at college level and could do advanced algebra equations, the public school system had tried to push the twins straight into middle school. Their parents resisted the move, stating life was more than just grades. Instead of calculus and chemistry, the twins were enrolled in first grade to learn a more complicated subject: socializing with their peers.

Unfortunately, “peers” was a very imperfect fit.

In theory their school was for the gifted. Yes, all their fellow students tested higher than the typical fifth-grader, but they were also dropped off by nannies in BMWs. At times it seemed that the parents’ net worth was more important than their children’s IQ. It meant that otherwise fascinating subjects were dumbed down to the class average. Art, for instance; their assignment was to draw a two-dimensional still life of what the teacher arranged on the center table. How interesting could a flat representation of a bouquet of sunflowers, a collection of stoneware bowls, and a length of red velvet be?