Wood Sprites

“Let’s keep that as Backup Plan B or maybe even C or D.” Louise gazed at the blueprint, feeling uneasy. If they could wait the twenty-seven days to the next Shutdown, fleeing to Pittsburgh would be simple. But she knew they couldn’t wait that long. They had to go soon. “Who the hell came up with the stupid idea of having Shutdown once a month? Why not days on Elfhome and nights on Earth, or something sane like that?”

Nikola took it as a serious question. He tilted his head as he announced, “That was actually one suggested schedule, but the elves rejected it. They proposed that Pittsburgh would visit Elfhome only once a year. Pittsburghers advocated that the city would go through Startup and Shutdown once a month, staying on Elfhome for forty-eight hours every thirty days. The UN chose the current schedule as a compromise.”

Compromise? The UN must be using some new definition of the word where neither party got anything they wanted.

If the UN “arbitrarily” set the cycle of Pittsburgh being stranded for a whole month, then it meant Ming really chose the timing. If Louise had to guess, he wanted to drive away the two million humans living in the metropolitan area. It was one thing to live in a city that occasionally visited another world, and quite another to be stuck there three hundred and fifty-three days out of the year. With one manipulation of the treaty terms, Ming made it so the humans fled Pittsburgh, leaving the city short of skilled manpower. People chosen by Ming could then be positioned on Elfhome.

For a moment, the scale of what was against them overwhelmed Louise. So much stood against them. Ming and all his people here at the mansion. His people in the EIA. The oni hidden among the humans. Elves like Sparrow. She wanted to reach out and take Jillian’s hand, but she knew that her twin wouldn’t be able to take her leaning on her. Not yet. Jillian was getting her feet under her, but she couldn’t be strong for Louise. In the very same way, Louise knew that she couldn’t go to Anna and tell her all the things she suspected of Ming. Esme, no doubt, had tried. When her mother wouldn’t listen, Esme had painted all her furniture black, built her secret lair, and woven complex plans.

“In my dream, he found you when you were much too young. Too small. Too helpless.”

Louise clung to memory. Esme knew that they would be caught and had left a secret hoard of weapons. They weren’t completely alone. If they could get to Elfhome, then they would have Alexander and Windwolf.

“They’ll finish the work on Lain’s bedroom tomorrow.” Louise circled back to the real threat. “All they really have to do is put up curtains and move in furniture.”

“How does it look?” Jillian asked.

Louise threw up her hands. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

“I want to see.” Jillian headed for the bathroom that connected the two bedrooms.

“Why?”

“It’s like a movie set that we had built.” Jillian opened the door and gasped. “Oh, Lou, it’s going to be beautiful.”

She walked to the center of Lain’s bedroom and spun slowly, arms outstretched.

The floor was now a deep warm black and the walls were a rich creamy gray. Dovetail had hung a new chandelier that was a wonderful cascade of silver branches and crystals.

“It’s going to be done,” Louise grumbled. “When they finish, Anna will want to redo Esme’s room. If they start tearing out everything, they’ll find the secret room.”

Louise had had uneasy dreams all week of Esme frantically giving orders as workers dismantled her spaceship around her. While Louise believed that the nightmare had actually been her own fear that Esme’s bedroom would be torn apart, she felt more and more sure that something horrible had happened to Esme in the cold darkness of space. While Louise still couldn’t think of Esme as “mother,” she’d begun to think of her as something like an aunt or a much older sister. It made her sad to think that Esme might have died painfully years before they were even born.

The question remained, though, why. What was Esme trying to do, arranging for children to be born and then leaving Earth? Whatever Esme had been attempting, it had been important enough that Esme had been willing to die trying to succeed. Had she succeeded or failed? Certainly lives had been at stake. Maybe even worlds.

But they didn’t have the luxury to worry about worlds right now. They had to protect the babies and Joy.

“We won’t let them remodel.” Jillian sounded like her normal self for once. “We’ll tell Anna that if she changes the bedroom, we’ll lose the only thing we have of Esme.”

It might work. It was probably why Anna hadn’t changed the room in the first place. But if Ming had already left for Elfhome, how soon would he want Anna and the twins to join him? How much time did they really have? It felt like a very short time.