Wood Sprites

Louise had her doubts about the entire plan, but she kept them to herself. Jillian was starting to sound like herself; there was no reason to poke holes in her plan.

* * *

They ate at the dinner table alone — if “alone” meant they had an army of servants watching their every move. Said servants could not be coaxed into giving up any useful information on where Ming and Anna were beyond “not currently home.” Was Ming even on the planet? Yves had been at the mansion to take the call about the explosion. So far, though, they had not met him face-to-face. Where was Yves? Was he personally going to oversee dealing with the disaster? Or was he in some computer center, chasing down bank transactions? According to Louise’s last check, they had stolen over nine hundred million dollars from the secret elves. Getting caught now would be very, very bad.

Unlike the breakfast they’d eaten “alone” with Anna, the menu hadn’t been altered.

The “meat” was something that Louise chose to pretend was small lobsters. (They looked more like insects than crustaceans.) She also pretended to eat it by breaking it into tiny little bits with her fork and knife. No wonder Esme had stashed so much freeze-dried food in the secret room; she must have known that they would be in danger of starving to death on the elves’ weird diet. Louise comforted herself with knowing that they could have lukewarm mac and cheese back in their room later.

Jillian had taken the baseball and peaked cap with her. She spent the meal arranging accidents with the ball. Louise was glad for the little acts of courage and rebellion, but she could feel Celine slipping toward breaking. They were speeding toward a vast array of possibilities, none of them leading to happy endings. Louise kicked Jillian before Celine could start down any of the paths. Jillian gave Louise an innocent look but stopped.

* * *

Nine hundred million dollars bought a lot of robotic mice. The twins could download modified schematics straight to the Indonesian manufacturer that used a mixture of high-end 3D printers and cheap hand laborers to create the “toys.” While the factory could quickly mass-produce a limited run of robotic rodents, US Customs, however, took a dim view of all things that went boom. While there probably were ways around import laws, the red tape would delay shipments to Monroeville.

So they went with mice armed with tasers. They needed a working prototype prior to the start of production. Luckily they had ordered lots of exotic printing supplies while working on the museum heist and Aunt Kitty had dutifully packed it. The design work seemed to help keep Jillian distracted from her grief; the ball and glove sat idle until she sent the job to their 3D printer. Louise had created a pattern for the mouse “skin” and started to deconstruct the rabbit fur muffs that Anna had gotten with the winter coats that she insisted on buying for them. (Really, it was the middle of July! What was Anna thinking? Hopefully nothing to do with a mischief of mice. . )

Nine hundred million dollars also rented a warehouse in Monroeville and hired on a small staff that believed they worked for a Belizean importing company. They would take delivery of the mice and whatever else the twins needed for crossing the Pittsburgh border.

“With all this money, we could just buy a small island and hire someone to be the babies’ mother,” Jillian pointed out. “It would simpler.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Louise shivered slightly when she saw that the total was now over a billion dollars stolen and climbing slowly. How much more did they have to take until Ming was unable to act? Had they already crippled him and were now wasting valuable time? Or was this just the tip of the iceberg and leaving now would be too soon? Thoughts of staying and leaving both filled her with unease. Was she going to know when the time was right?

Jillian thud-thunked her baseball. “Just saying we could make it so no adults can tell us what to do.”

“Mary Poppins is not going to fly down out of the sky with her talking umbrella!” Although, in one dream, she had; but Louise was willing to bet that was a normal kind of dream and not a prophetic one. “If we hired someone, unless they’re complete idiots, they’re going to notice there’s no one taking care of us and that we have gobs of money. How long do you think it will take them to figure out that they could easily hurt us until we gave them everything?”

“We would hire nice people and do background checks.”

“Oh, grow up. The only people we could risk hiring are the type that wouldn’t call the police the moment they realized we were orphans living by ourselves. And someone like that would also be ones that steal us blind, first chance they got.”

“It always works out in the movies.” Jillian mumbled and thud-thunked her baseball again.