Wood Sprites

28: Flying Monkey Five

Riding to school with Nikola Tesla Dufae was totally different than being with Tesla the nanny-bot. They’d learned that he was enraptured by any shiny new situation and would fall silent, satisfied to just look and listen. Once things became familiar, however, he started to ask questions. Sunday had been a hell of an effort to get him to stay quiet as their parents cataloged all that had been taken from the house. Halfway to the city, on the crowded train, the questions started.

“Where are we going?”

“We told you that you shouldn’t talk unless we’re alone,” Louise whispered as the high school student standing beside them glanced down at Nikola. She tightened her hold on his leash.

He gave a little whimper. “It just that Joy is dreaming of cake and she’s wiggling her fingers and it tickles.”

At times he said things that hurt Louise’s brain. How did he know that Joy was dreaming of cake? Was he somehow aware of her thoughts? How was he aware at all? He was a couple of frozen cells inside a magical egg-shaped thing riding on top of a magical generator within a robotic body.

And how exactly was he feeling Joy wiggling her fingers? The storage bin didn’t have sensors.

She petted his head to give them both something else to think about. He laid his head on her lap and thumped his tail.

Jillian hadn’t noticed the exchange. She bent over her tablet, memorizing lines to the play. Between stealing the nactka and the embryos, they’d ignored the play but it was nine days away. It would have been less if the bombing hadn’t pushed it back.

“We’re going to school,” Louise whispered. “And I know you’re going to have a lot of questions, but you need to not ask us any of them until we’re alone.”

He whimpered again and sighed deeply.

Louise felt bad for him. It would kill her not to ask questions all day. Maybe there were other ways of getting around him not talking. “Can you text?”

“Yes! We can!” He’d gained more control over Tesla’s body over the weekend. His pointed ears dipped in worry. “Can we?”

“Yes, you can text me.” She hugged him. “But you’ll have to be patient for me to answer. I might not be able to text you back immediately.”

Jillian surprised Louise by introducing Iggy to Nikola Tesla. He’d been waiting at the top of the station’s staircase. As usual, he went to pet Tesla even as he called hello to them.

“Iggy, this is Nikola Tesla.” Over the weekend, it had become apparent that Nikola was their little brother, while Tesla was his robotic body. They’d debated on his last name. Should they use “Mayer” or “Bell” or “Dufae?” In the end they’d decided to use their biological father’s name, even though it was too dangerous to actually say aloud. “Nikola, this is Iggy.”

Iggy paused with hand outstretched, a smile tugging at his mouth, as if he wasn’t sure if what she’d said was a joke or not.

“We downloaded a personality and gave him a real name,” Jillian lied. “Say ‘hello,’ Nikola.”

Nikola tilted his head in confusion and then leaned close to Louise to whisper. “We’re so confused. When can we talk?”

Louise glared at Jillian for making things harder. Jillian rolled her eyes, indicating that she had a plan but couldn’t discuss it right now. Louise sighed and patted Nikola, “When we introduce you to someone, you can say ‘hello’ and ‘nice to meet you’ and such.”

Nikola stared at her for a minute and then turned to Iggy. “Hello. Nice to meet you.” He looked back at Louise. “Silly old bear.”

How did she get to be the bad guy in this?

“Do you have your lines memorized?” Jillian changed the subject.

“Yes. I think.” Iggy held up his left hand like it was a hook and waved it. “Spirit that haunts this dark lagoon tonight, dost hear me?”

“Are you talking to us?” Nikola asked.

Louise groaned and pulled him on ahead via the leash. “Why don’t you two practice in private?”

“He wasn’t talking to us?” Nikola whispered.

“No!” Louise whispered.

Flying Monkey Five was in their classroom.

Louise had paused in the doorway at the sight of a weirdly familiar strange boy standing in profile in front of Miss Hamilton’s desk. His focus was on Miss Hamilton, letting Louise stare unnoticed as she tried to figure out where she knew him from. He was as tall as Iggy and slender without seeming weedy. Handsome and obviously rich, he would have been a perfect prince for Elle’s Little Mermaid princess.

Prince Charming made her think of Crown Prince Kiss Butt, and, with a gasp, she realized who the strange boy was. She jerked backwards into Jillian, who’d been trying to convince Nikola to stay in their locker instead of exploring the new landscape.

“What’s—” Jillian started to ask what was wrong and then yelped slightly in surprise as Louise caught her wrist and dragged her down the hall at a half run. “What’s going on? Where are we going?”

Louise banged open the girls’ restroom door and pulled Jillian and Nikola in with her. Most boys would rather die than go into a girls’ restroom; she was praying that Flying Monkey Five was the same. But he was one of them: kidnappers and killers. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

“What’s wrong?”

Louise opened her mouth to answer and then thought to check the stalls for anyone who might overhear them. She went down the row, swinging open the doors one after another. The metal doors clanged loudly in the tiled room.

“Lou!” Jillian complained. “You’re scaring me.”

“One of them is here. Flying Monkey Five. He’s in our classroom.”

Jillian gasped and skittered sideways from the doorway, looking scared. Louise really wanted her to be the brave one, because if she wasn’t, it meant Louise would have to be the brave one, and she didn’t feel ready to be it.

“What — what is he doing here?” Jillian whispered.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Louise paced in front of the sinks. The mirror reflected back her twin’s fear twice fold. “Esme warned us about the Empire of Evil, and he’s one of them. She said that they’re dangerous. He’s probably here to do evil things — like kidnap us or steal Joy or something.” She didn’t want to scare Nikola by adding him to the list of possible targets. It was suspicious, though, that right after they’d saved the last of Esme’s babies, the Flying Monkey had showed up.

Jillian went into one of the stalls and shut the door and locked it. She stood in the stall for a minute before asking fearfully, “Do you really think so?”

Louise forced herself to ignore the fear that was jittering through her. “Why else would he suddenly show up at our school?”

Jillian unzipped her pants, pushed them down and sat on the toilet. She was stalling though — she wasn’t actually going pee. “How would anyone know about Joy? And even if they figured out how to open Dufae’s box — which I’m betting it would take them more than a few days to do — how would they know that Dufae or someone else didn’t take the nactka with Joy in it? It has been sitting around locked for nearly three hundred years.”

“I feel weird,” Nikola whimpered. “What is this I feel?”

Louise suspected he was afraid for the first time in his life. She hugged him tightly. “It’s okay. We won’t let anyone take Joy.”

Jillian growled softly in the stall. “We’ve missed something if he’s here. We’ve never been fingerprinted, so they couldn’t have found us that way. We never showed up on the museum security system while the chest was at the museum. We erased everything at Dad’s work, so no one should even be able to link us to Esme or Dufae. Even if they did, they couldn’t know that we know anything about unlocking magical boxes.”

“April knows,” Louise said.

“She knows that Esme left us something, but we haven’t told her about being elves, or Dufae, or any of that, so she couldn’t have known we were going to take anything from the museum. And why would anyone suspect two nine-year-old girls of robbing a museum with magic?”

“But the Flying Monkey is here,” Louise pointed out since it was undeniable.

“The only reason he’d be here is. .” Jillian trailed off.

“Why?” Louise asked.

“I don’t know!” Jillian stood and zipped up her pants. “I was hoping you’d answer the question.”

Jillian came out of the stall and washed her hands.

Nikola glanced back and forth between them. “We’re confused. Who is the Flying Monkey? Is he one of the men with the guns?”

They hadn’t stopped to consider that Ming the Merciless might have robbed their house. It was a frightening thought. “Maybe.”

Because of the robbery, they had decided to bring everything irreplaceable with them to school, and that included the photographs. Louise dug them out of her backpack and flipped through six pictures. The third photo made her stop with a gasp.

“What is it?” Jillian asked.

Louise held out the photograph of the blindfolded woman. “Is this who I think it is?”

Jillian frowned in concentration. “It might be her. I’m not sure.” She swore. “Our stupid genetic donor! Why give us a photo of a woman and then draw a blindfold on the picture so we can’t recognize her?”

“Who?” Nikola moved so he could see the photo. “Oh, Anna Desmarais.”

“How do you know?” Jillian growled.

“Facial recognition is at ninety-six point three percent. The blindfold doesn’t cover all of the bone structure of the eyes, so the match is positive. We could be a hundred percent sure if we could see the eye fold and retina.”

Jillian snatched the photograph out of Louise’s hand and read the words off the back. “Why did Esme write ‘Queen Gertrude of Denmark’ on this? Why not Anna Desmarais? And why did she use so many literary references? What does Hamlet have to do with Flash Gordon and the Wizard of Oz?”

“Maybe Anna isn’t her real name,” Louise guessed. “Maybe Esme didn’t know anyone’s real names, only that they were using fake names, and guessed that they would change their names again before we would ever meet them.”

“But why then call her father the king of Denmark? Is Edmond Desmarais Neil’s brother? Why would either one of them be king? Wouldn’t this be like Prince Albert and Prince Philip? If you married the queen, you don’t become the king! You stay a prince; your son is the one that becomes the next king.”

Louise had no idea how to answer any of those questions.

The bell rang, and they were now officially late.

“What are we going to do?” Jillian cried.

Louise fanned the photographs so she could see all of them at once. Other than the old vintage photographs and Esme’s cryptic labels, they had no idea who the people were or why Esme considered them dangerous. “We need to find out who they really are. Either we go back home or we go to class.”

“He’s in class,” Jillian pointed out. “If we cut class, the school will call Mom and Dad.”

Louise shook her head against that possibility. They needed to keep their parents safe.

“We could do it,” Nikola said.

“Do what?” Jillian said.

“I don’t know. .” Louise didn’t want Nikola to use his taser. She’d actually considered it for one second when Jillian asked what they were going to do. That would end badly. They were in deep enough trouble without adding assault and battery.

“We can search databases for pattern matches,” Nikola said. “It’s part of Tesla’s programming.”

“These are old photos. You might have to search back in some old archives to find matches.”

Nikola nodded. “We will. It’s a little distracting. We’ll have to focus on it.”

“It will be better if you stay in our locker. You’ll have Joy with you. The two of you together should be safe.” Or cause enough chaos to bring down the building. Louise really wished she felt better about leaving the two alone, but taking them into the classroom with the Flying Monkey seemed like a worse plan.

Once they had Nikola hidden, they walked slowly to the classroom, hand in hand.

Louise listed out the reasons they had nothing to fear but fear itself. “They can’t know about the babies. They can’t know about the codex. They can’t know about Joy. So they can’t suspect us of being anything but normal fifth-graders.”

“What about Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo?” Jillian whispered. “Nigel could have ratted us out.”

Louise shook her head. “No, the photographs are eighteen years old or more. Flying Monkey is here because of something that happened before we were even born. Maybe why we were born — or at least why Alexander was born. The way our life has been going lately, I don’t think we can even guess what the hell is going to happen next.”

Jillian hugged her tightly. “We’re innocent, normal fifth-graders.”

It was an act that they weren’t scared, so Jillian walked in first, giving the performance of her life. Louise followed, hoping that she wasn’t blowing it for both of them.

Flying Monkey Five was still at Miss Hamilton’s desk. He glanced toward the door as they came in, and his gaze sharpened in interest. It took all of Louise’s control to keep fear off her face. She should look curious. An innocent, normal fifth-grader would be interested in a new kid. Oh, God, she hoped she looked curious.

He did look like Crown Prince Kiss Butt. He had the same strong but nearly too sharp lines of his face. His hair was pale blond. His eyes were blazing green; it looked like he had to be wearing contacts to make them that vivid. He locked gazes with her, and the corners of his mouth turned up slightly.

Something about it made her angry. She didn’t know who or what he was, but she had spent a lifetime getting around people smarter than him. She gave him her best “I have no idea what you’re talking about” smile. As his smile faded, she felt stronger, like she’d already defeated him.

She settled in her seat beside Jillian and ran her hands over the desk. The school had tried to keep them apart in first grade. It was a simple matter to lay siege to the adults’ patience and slowly but surely push for what they wanted: seats together. It had taken a month to wear down two sets of teachers, the principal and vice principal and both of their parents, but in the end they had won.

Game of wits, she could win.

“Class, this is Tristan LaClaire. He’s going to have a very hard time as there’s only a few days of school left, so please be nice to him.”

There was already a desk for him as if produced by magic. Thankfully it was across the room, but still he had direct sight of them without needing to turn around.

Elle put her hand up as Tristan settled into his seat. “What will he be doing during the play? All the parts have been taken.”

Miss Hamilton considered. She probably thought about the fact that they were short on pirates but also knew that the pirates were losing popularity in her class as the rehearsals continued. A new student didn’t need an immediate strike against him. “He can be one of the Lost Boys.”

“But we already have all the Lost Boys.”

“We can have an unnamed one. It won’t be a problem.”

Unnamed Lost Boy. Louise shivered slightly at how fitting that felt for the boy seated to her far right. Tristan LaClaire? She felt sure that wasn’t his name any more than Flying Monkey Five.

He was here, reason unknown. The key to what he wanted might be connected to who he really was.

It was nerve-wracking to have Tristan, or whatever his real name was, in class. He was there, in the corner of her eye, no matter how hard she tried to ignore him. Every time she glanced his direction, he would meet her gaze and smirk.

It was the smirk that annoyed her the most. He knew that she had no idea why he was there and was feeling superior about it. Worse, she couldn’t even guess. If her life didn’t include baby dragons and robots possessed by unborn brothers and books of magic, she could easily come up with a dozen reasons why Tristan was in their classroom. With all normal logic removed, though, it was dangerous to try and guess.

In art class, they were doing team projects. Tristan was assigned to Elle’s team since they were short one person. Louise worked to ignore him, making it a point to sit with her back to them. Unlike class, though, they were allowed to talk in the art room.

“I don’t think they like me much.” Tristan’s tone was more smugly amused than hurt.

“They’re just really shy.” Elle surprised Louise by coming to their defense. “Until recently they didn’t talk to anyone. Which is kind of sad. They’re actually very nice once they get over being too shy to talk.”

“Oh.” He sounded almost concerned. Was he simply changing his tone because he thought that Elle was a friend of theirs? “What brought them out of their shell?”

Louise nearly forgot how to breathe as she realized that Elle could spill everything. Their contact with Nigel made it clear that they’d put too much into the videos; anyone who watched them would assume that Lemon-Lime knew everything about Elfhome.

“They joined the Girl Scouts.” Elle misled him brilliantly.

By lunchtime Louise was jumpy and short-tempered. She just wanted to lock herself in the girls’ restroom and scream. Jillian seemed fine, at least on the surface, but she’d retreated behind Peter Pan’s fearless personality.

Still, Jillian flinched just as much as Louise when Tristan sat down at their lunch table.

Zahara eyed him warily and asked the question that everyone had avoided all morning. “Why did you come to school so late in the year? We’re almost done.”

“I’m on a fact-finding mission,” Tristan said.

“Facts on what?” Louise forced herself to ask.

“This and that.” He poked at his lunch. “How good the food is, for one. It made more sense for me to come now and see if I like this school enough to go in the fall than to wait until September and find out I hate it.”

“You hate it, then?” Jillian dared to ask.

“I’d have to be fairly shallow to make up my mind I hated something in less than four hours,” Tristan said.

Louise was tempted to say it had only taken her four minutes to hate him, but she clenched her teeth against the impulse.

“Why did you change schools so close to the end of the year?” Zahara asked. “Did your family move?”

Something like pain flashed through his eyes, and he focused on his plate. “Yes. My father’s work keeps me moving around. I was in Pasadena, California. Bird-watching.”

After all of Nikola’s “we” comments, Louise noticed that Tristan said “I” when he talked about moving and work. It seemed that, if he was telling the truth, he’d been in California alone. Who would send a nine-year-old alone to the other side of the country?

Ming the Merciless, obviously.

Did that mean that Ming was the Flying Monkeys’ father? There had been a family resemblance between all the males.

“Do you surf?” Iggy asked.

Tristan shook his head. “Apparently Scandinavians are great boaters and ice skaters but as swimmers, we suck. I stuck to skateboarding.”

It was agreed that skateboarding was cool, too, most likely because almost everyone had some experience with it. Even Jillian and Louise had done their share of collecting bruises.

“You don’t look French,” Jillian said in a very Peter tone.

“Ah, yes, the eyes.” Tristan vaguely motioned to his eyes, which had an epicanthic fold. “My family were originally Sami, it’s a small tribe of indigenous people of Scandinavia. We were in France only long enough to pick up a French name. My father moved to New York before I was born.”

Only the very last part sounded like the truth.

“So where do you live?” Iggy asked.

“I’ve got a condo in Queens.”

He had used “I” again. Did that mean he lived there alone? Surely someone who was nine years old didn’t live alone. Or did it mean he wasn’t actually nine?

Nikola blinked at them when they opened their locker. “We found them.”

“Shh.” Louise petted him. She felt guilty. She hadn’t checked her texts, since Tristan seemed to be watching them like a hawk. “Don’t talk until we say it’s safe.”

He nodded.

With heart hammering in her chest, she and Jillian walked out with Nikola tucked between them.

Tristan was doing a bad job of pretending that he wasn’t waiting for them at the front door. “A nanny-bot?”

“Yes,” Louise growled.

“I guess no one is picking you up, either.” Tristan waved to the line of luxury cars that were picking up the other students.

“We have Tesla.” Louise gripped the leash tightly.

Tristan pressed a hand to his chest. “I feel safer already.”

They attempted to hurry down the street toward the subway station, but he fell into step with them.

“What are you doing?” Louise snapped.

“I’m going home,” Tristan said. “I was afraid I was going to have to go all alone, so I’m glad that I can go with you.”

Louise stopped and faced him. “What?”

“We all live in Astoria.” He smirked. “So I can go home with you. It’s much safer that way.”

They walked to the subway station in tense silence. The twins had the excuse that they were shy, but that would only work for so long. They should find something safe to talk about. Something like school. Or him.

“What do your parents do?” Louise tentatively went down the safest route once they boarded the train and found seats.

“Oh. My mother is a fortune-teller. My father is a king in exile.”

“What?” the twins both asked.

Tristan laughed. “Well, that’s the cool way to put what they do. My mother is a hedge-fund manager. It means she guesses the future and invests in it. She’s very good at it.”

“And your father? The king?” Somehow that rang very true.

“He’s very, very rich, so he really doesn’t do anything at all, except collect people that make him richer and more powerful. People like my mother.”

“What country was your father king of?” Jillian asked.

“Nailau Peshyosa. It’s changed its name since he was forced out. And he wasn’t the king per se. He was Aumvoutui. King is a whole lot cooler sounding.”

Louise leaned down to mess with her shoelaces to hide her face. She recognized the name Nailau Peshyosa. It was ancient Elvish for the Inner Sea or the Mediterranean Sea. Ashfall had been Queen Soulful’s father and the first king of the elves. When he was crowned, the name was changed — over two thousand years ago.

She swallowed hard as she suddenly realized that Tristan looked the same in his photograph that Esme had left for them eighteen years earlier. He’d looked nine years old in the picture and he still looked nine now.

He wasn’t human.

She took a deep breath, fighting to stay calm. He could be lying about his father being a deposed elvish king. But why would he pick such a set of lies? Or had they been able to convince him that they were nothing but normal fifth-graders? Was this some kind of elaborate final test? To see if they reacted to the obscure names that only elves would know?

No matter what he thought they were, the fact remained that he wasn’t human.

Was he an elf?

Elves might be immortal, but they were born infants and needed to grow up first, just a lot slower than humans did. It took elves a hundred years before they could reach the physical maturity of a human eighteen-year-old. It meant at thirty-something they would be like an eight-year-old and at fifty they would be like a nine-year-old. There wasn’t a big difference between eight and nine.

So he was a young elf born approximately fifty years ago. The photograph would have been taken when he was in his thirties. If his father was an exiled “king,” then maybe it was why Esme had used the name Ming the Merciless. Ming was an emperor, which was kind of like a king.

It seemed as if Louise’s life was going to stay strange and impossible to guess.

Louise straightened up to study Tristan. Sunlight and shadows passed over his face as the train carried them toward home. Except for the slight almond shape to his eyes, and the fact that he should be really old, there were no real indications that he was an elf. His ears looked as round as hers.

“What?” He actually seemed leery of her.

“What year were you born in?”

“Same as you.”

Louise shook her head. “It depends if your birthday is in the spring or in the fall.”

He had to do the math. He did it fast, but he had to think. “Twenty-twenty-two.”

Most kids said it two-two or twenty-two.

“Ah, spring birthday.” Because fall birthdays would make him a fourth-grader now. “Are you Water Tiger or Earth Monkey?”

“What?”

“Chinese New Year starts in February. You’re either a Tiger or Monkey.” She lied, since Ox fell before Tiger.

“I–I never paid attention to that,” he stated. “What are you?”

“We are Tigers. We’re lucky and brave, but we can’t pass up a challenge, especially when honor is at stake or when we’re protecting the people we love.”

“Ah, I must be a Monkey then. I was born in January.”

She hadn’t told him on what side of the divide she and Jillian fell. He knew their birthday. She tried not to feel like this was the most frightening thing she had ever stumbled across. Wait — he’d known that they lived in Astoria, too. She wanted to run screaming, but they still had a long way to go. They were only now pulling into Queensboro Plaza.

Luckily some boys got on, loud and smelling of alcohol, and he focused fiercely on them.

The twins collapsed in the front hall in a quivering heap when they got home.

“I can’t believe this!” Jillian cried. “This is horrible!”

“Why can’t we talk to people?” Nikola whimpered. “Or at least, why can we talk to some people and not others? What’s the point of being able to talk if not to do it?”

Joy somehow escaped Tesla’s storage compartment to bounce on Louise’s stomach. “No! No! Food first! Joy was good. Feed Joy!”

“Okay!” Louise cried. “Okay! Food and talk!”

Since Jillian seemed even more stressed by the events, Louise took charge of Joy’s feeding. They had moved the growing supply of cat food to the back of the drawer of baking supplies since their mother rarely had time to actually bake. Joy bounced impatiently in place, clapping her hands as Louise opened the can.

Nikola stood and watched the process, his size putting him nearly level with the counter. “We don’t understand why Tristan said he was born in 2022. He wasn’t. Why he would say that? He didn’t even like saying it; he found it very stressful.”

“How can you tell?” Jillian asked.

“His breathing changed and his heartbeat went up.”

“Nom, nom, nom.” Joy shoveled in the cat food, dribbling it everywhere. They’d forgotten the paper towels, so Louise scooped up baby dragon and can and carried them both to the sink.

“Louise!” Jillian cried. “It’s all over the floor now. Nikola, don’t walk in it!”

Nikola looked at his paw and then shook it through the micro-tremor clean cycle.

Louise sighed as Jillian shrieked. How were they going to keep Nikola and Joy hidden from everyone? It was all becoming overwhelming. It was one thing when it was just their parents and the punishment for being discovered the loss of Internet and other privileges. It seemed like a logic puzzle without a solution. They couldn’t go to school without Tesla standing guard. The nactka didn’t need magic to keep the embryos frozen; they had made several test runs with ice prior to robbing the clinic. What the lack of magic would do to Nikola mentally, they were loath to find out. They had discovered by accident that moving the nactka and generator out of the Tesla body, however, made Nikola blind, mute, deaf and paralyzed. Needless to say, none of them wanted to deprive him of his “body.”

They had the second generator but its battery pack needed to be charged during the day while they were at school. They could make another battery pack — actually they should, just so they had a spare — but they couldn’t finish it and have it fully charged by tomorrow morning. The twins weren’t sure what would happen if they separated Joy from the generator for any length of time. The baby dragon refused to cooperate in any experiments. It was possible that the lack of magic would kill her, so they didn’t force her. Also a plan of leaving Joy home alone had “bad idea” written all over it.

So they were stuck with the foursome: Nikola and Tesla, Joy and the generator.

With Flying Monkey Five in their classroom, taking all four to school seemed like a recipe for disaster.

“Please listen to us.” Nikola pressed up against Louise. “We’ve waited all day to speak with you. Please let us talk!”

“Okay, we’re listening.”

Nikola opened his mouth and then stood there a moment. Finally he admitted in a quiet little voice, “We don’t know where to start.”

“What is Tristan’s real name? It’s not Flying Monkey Five. No one names their kid that.”

“We’re not sure. When he was born, he was given the name of Tristan Jacques Desmarais, but if we understand names correctly, that’s his real name. Maybe. His father’s name is listed as Edmond Desmarais and that’s not his father’s real name, so Desmarais can’t be his real-real name. Right?”

“Wait. Desmarais? He’s Anna Desmarais’ son?”

He nodded. “Here. We’ll show you.” He looked toward the new kitchen television, and it clicked on. A sepia photograph of Ming the Merciless scowled down at them. “This is the earliest photo I could find of Ming. At that time he was known as Pruet Lalumiere. It is dated April 16, 1853.”

“Ming is an elf?” Jillian cried in surprise as Nikola flashed more photos of Ming on the screen. “Whoa, slower, we can’t see that fast!”

“Sorry.” Nikola slowed down to a few seconds per photo. Nearly too fast to follow except that they were all of Ming, unsmiling, in old-fashioned clothes. After the first one or two photos, which seemed to be portraits, the following pictures were candid shots where Ming barely seemed to realize he was being photographed. Horses were replaced by Model T Fords and then color slowly leached in. The time between the photos grew longer, as if he became more and more cautious of having his picture taken. As an elf stuck on Earth, he most likely didn’t want proof that he was immortal just lying around.

“I think Ming is an elf king exiled from Elfhome,” Louise said. “I think that Tristan was telling the truth about his father. He just didn’t expect us to take him seriously.”

“Weird. Why would he do that?”

“Tristan is an elf.” Louise pointed out what she’d realized on the train to support that. “And elves don’t lie.”

“It’s socially frowned upon,” Jillian grumbled. “It doesn’t mean they can’t. It’s just extremely dishonorable to lie.”

“If we were normal kids, we wouldn’t have believed what he said, so it’s fairly safe to tell us the truth.”

“But if he thinks we’re normal kids, why is he at our school?”

“I don’t know.” The obvious answer was that Anna Desmarais had sent him there. But why?

“I could only find four photographs of Crown Prince Kiss Butt. His name is listed as Yves Desmarais.” Nikola flashed through the pictures on fast-forward.

Yves? As in the man who’d ordered Alexander kidnapped and Windwolf killed? If Ming was the exiled ruler of the elves, then that would make sense. The crown prince had met with his father’s still-loyal subjects to pass on orders. As viceroy, Windwolf represented Queen Soulful Ember’s presence in Pittsburgh. Not only would Windwolf report any troop movements, he had the power to reduce them to slag. If the twins’ research was correct, then there weren’t any other domana-caste elves in Pittsburgh.

“Wait!” Jillian cried. “Back up to the second photo!” The picture showed a collection of people, all unaware of the camera as they stared at something horrific. Only Yves seemed unaffected by whatever they were looking at. Jillian pointed at a woman with both hands covering her mouth. “That’s Esme!”

Nikola tilted his head as he chased info down on the Internet. “Yes, that’s Esme Shenske. Anna Desmarais is her mother.”

“What?” Jillian and Louise both shouted.

Nikola cringed away. “Anna Desmarais is Esme Shenske’s mother.”

“Oh my God, she’s our grandmother?” Jillian and Louise both cried.

Nikola gave a complete report. “Anna Cohan married Neil Shenske and had two daughters, Lain and Esme. Eight months after Neil was killed, she married Edmond Desmarais and had two sons, Lucien and Tristan.”

“Flying Monkeys Four and Five.” Louise ticked them off on her fingers. “Crown Prince Kiss Butt — Yves — was child one. Lain and Esme are two and three. Their little half brothers were four and five.”

“Oh geez, we’ve been going nuts trying to figure this out, and it’s been her family all along.” Jillian gave a scream and waved her hands over her head. “What the hell? Why didn’t she just put their names on the photos?”

“Because Edmond Desmarais isn’t Ming’s real name any more than Ming is.” Louise paced as her stomach churned. “We know Tristan is the baby of the family, and Esme left eighteen years ago. She might have assumed he would grow up. If we hadn’t recognized him from his photo, we certainly wouldn’t be able to identify him by the name he gave us. The obviously fake name of Flying Monkey Five forced us to do an extensive search.”

Jillian growled. “I still say it was a stupid way of warning us! Her way didn’t do any good at all. He’s in our class! He followed us home! He knows where we live now.”

“He knew before he got on the train,” Louise said. “Remember? He knew we were going to Astoria. And he knows what our birthday is.”

Jillian eyes went wide. “Really?”

Louise bit her bottom lip while trying to remember everything their mother ever told them about Anna Desmarais. In the light of this new information, things looked strangely different. “Oh. Oh. Oh shit.”

“What?”

“Anna kept going on and on about Mom stealing something from her. She tore Mom’s offices apart trying to find what Mom took from her. What Mom stole was us! Anna knows, and she wants us back.”

“How could she know?” Jillian cried. “We erased all the records.”

Louise squinted as she watched Joy stuff handfuls of smelly cat food into her mouth. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. They’d been missing pieces and hadn’t been able to put anything together. Now they had lots of pieces, but it didn’t make sense. Were they still missing too much? They had erased all the information connecting Esme to all her children: Alexander, themselves, and Nikola. They hadn’t been able to remove Esme’s billing records without raising certain data flags in the system. So anyone checking could see that Esme had been a customer, and that she’d been paying for storage for eighteen years, but there wouldn’t be information on any of the genetic material she’d deposited. Their parents were never billed, not for the twins’ embryos or Nikola’s, so there wouldn’t be any records of what was taken. The company could have done a manual inventory, but their father would have mentioned that. What had the twins missed? And how did this fit with Yves wanting Alexander, Dufae’s box, and Joy?

Joy finished eating by sticking her whole head into the can and licking it clean. They’d learned that they couldn’t stop this ritual. Joy added a new twist by flinging the empty can over her shoulder. It bounced off the upper cabinet and, either by luck or design, landed in the trashcan.

“Joy! You broke the cabinet!” Jillian pointed to a section of bare wood in the frame.

“No, that’s a bullet hole from the robbers that—” Louise gasped as she realized what they’d missed. “We didn’t erase all the records! Mom and Dad would have copied everything they could get their hands on about our donors. Family history of illnesses. Genetic disorders. They would have records here at the house.”

“And the robbers took everything.” Jillian swore. “That bitch! Anna Desmarais wasn’t burying the hatchet by giving Mom those gala tickets, she was making sure we were all out of the house so she could have our home robbed!”

Louise nodded slowly as she double-checked her twin’s logic. “If she hadn’t insisted that Mom and Dad bring us along, they might have hired a babysitter to come to the house. Any random day, someone could be home sick or waiting for a delivery or have a doctor’s appointment. The only way she could be sure no one was home was to make a big stink about how she was being noble by giving Mom enough tickets for the whole family. Once she knew we were at the gala, she kept Mom busy so we couldn’t leave.”

Jillian growled more curses while making sure that the cat food can was buried deep within the trash. Louise turned on the sink’s faucet and washed Joy with hand soap. By now the baby dragon loved the combination of warm water and attention. She purred like a kitty, rubbing against Louise’s hands.

Jillian made a small sound of discovery and pulled their old toothbrushes out of the trash. Their mother hadn’t wanted the twins using them just in case the robbers had touched them. “DNA! That’s why the thieves took the toothbrushes: they have Mom and Dad’s DNA on them. With these, Desmarais could prove that we’re her — wait — no — the robbers didn’t take ours. So why did they just take Mom and Dad’s?”

Louise considered as she wrapped Joy in a clean dishtowel. “It could be that they wanted DNA to confirm Mom and Dad’s identities, in case they were using fake ID.”

Jillian snorted at the irony. “Pot calling kettle black.” She frowned at the toothbrushes, obviously debating if she should actually put them back in the trash where a dumpster diver could retrieve them. “Maybe that’s why the Flying Monkey is at school then. They didn’t get DNA samples from us. Maybe he’s trying to steal our DNA.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Louise started to pace. She thought better in motion. “Why send in an undercover kid when you could do something like put someone in as the substitute school nurse and have her check the fifth grade for lice? They could have had someone follow us on to the train and pull a hair or two out without us noticing. Hell, they could have paid a janitor to clean the floor of our locker; there’s probably lots of our hair with tags intact.”

“Because they’re not smart enough to think of it?” Jillian shoved the toothbrushes back into the trash.

“If I could think of three things in one minute, they should have been able to think of something in a shorter period of time than it takes to enroll a kid in a private school like Perelman.”

“He’s definitely at school because of us! There’s no way it could be anything else; he stuck to us all day. I think he would have followed us into the bathroom if it wouldn’t get him into trouble.”

“Maybe he’s supposed to kidnap us.”

“Him?”

“He’s half-elf; he’s probably a lot stronger than he looks. And he might know jujitsu or judo or something. He’s fifty years old; he’s had time to get a black belt in every martial art there is. He could be super ninja.”

“There’s two of us!” Jillian said.

“Three.” Joy proved that she could count.

“Eight.” Nikola shrank back from the collective stare. “Maybe? Not all of us think we should count Tesla, but if we did, we would be eight.”

Smart as Louise was, trying to understand how Nikola existed made her brain hurt. “I don’t think he’s going to try to kidnap us. If he was, he could have done it today easily.”

“Kill us?” Jillian guessed and then shook her head along with Louise. “No, all the same things apply. It doesn’t make sense to send in your kid to do your dirty work. You use someone that can’t be connected back to you.”

Nikola stared at Jillian. “It bothers us that you know that.”

“Muhahaha!” Jillian gave an evil laugh and Nikola ducked behind Louise.

“Jillian!” Louise wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or bad that she sounded like their mother.

Jillian snickered. “It’s been a standard thriller trope since Hitchcock did Strangers on a Train. Most people are killed by someone that they know, so cops always consider family and friends as their first suspects. Anyone with half a brain knows that. So it stands to reason that the Desmaraises wouldn’t use their kid to do their dirty work.”

“But if the cops believed he was a really a nine-year-old stranger, would they even think to question him?”

Jillian’s eyes went wide with fear.

Nikola tilted his head as if listening to something and then announced, “Mom just got off the train. She’ll be here shortly.”

The twins yelped in unison.

“We should tell Mom!” Louise cried as she ran upstairs with Joy. Nikola started to chase after her but then stopped on the stairway landing when he realized that Jillian was staying in the kitchen.

“Everything? Are you insane?” Jillian shouted as she hurriedly wiped clean the floor and sink. “They won’t believe us. At least for most of it. And the rest? They’re going to kill us for!”

“What?” Nikola cried.

“Jilly!” Louise ran back down the steps to where Nikola crouched on the landing in fear. “They’re not going to kill us.” A shiver of fear went through her as she realized that their parents would never believe that Nikola was alive and real. They might not “kill” the twins, but they might do something awful to the frozen embryos stored within Tesla. “Come on. It’s going to be all right. We won’t let anything happen to you. Okay?”

They ignored two calls from their mother to come help with dinner while they argued in heated whispers. When they heard their father arrive fifteen minutes later, they had reached a tentative agreement as to what to say and who should say it. They crept downstairs only to find their parents in the middle of their own whispered discussion.

Their mother hissed a curse word and growled softly, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, due diligence starts next week.”

“This is beyond insane.”

“It’s a holding company that they own. It could be just coincidence.”

“Yeah, right.” Their mother slammed shut the refrigerator door and yelled, “Girls!”

“We’re here,” Jillian answered for them as they’d agreed.

Their mother’s visible anger vanished when she saw their faces. “What did you do?” she asked warily.

“We know who robbed us and why,” Jillian said.

“What?”

“After we blew up our playhouse and found out where we came from, we got curious and went through your computer and found the names of our genetic donors.”

“Their names? On our computers?”

Jillian nodded and lied. “It was on some documents listing out their racial and religious and medicals records. White. Jewish. Which of their parents were still alive. Hereditary diseases. That kind of information.”

“I–I—I didn’t think we ever got their names.”

“It was there,” Jillian insisted. “And we copied their names and started to look up information on them. We just wanted to know if we had any older brothers or sisters.”

Their mother covered her face with her hands, which meant she didn’t want them to know what she was feeling.

Louise ignored the plan and jumped to the point. “Our eggs were from a woman named Esme Shenske. She’s Anna Desmarais’ daughter.”

Jillian frowned at Louise going off-script. It forced her to jump ahead without all their quickly plotted arguments as to why they were right without incriminating themselves more. “That’s why we were robbed. Anna Desmarais is trying to find proof that we’re her granddaughters.”

Louise braced herself for her parents’ outburst. They stood silent for a moment and then looked at each other.

“Just coincidence?” Their mother finally broke the silence.

Their father spread his hands helplessly. “It is damning.”

“What is just coincidence?” Louise asked.

Their parents exchanged a look.

“I don’t think — We don’t know — It’s just going to scare them,” their father stuttered.

Their mother shook her head. “It’s better that they hear it from us first.”

Their father sighed and nodded. “Desmarais is buying my company.”

Louise swallowed down on the fear that jumped up inside her. They’d erased all the information tracing back to them. More importantly, everything that connected Nikola to Esme. At least, everything that was online and easily searched. If the company used offline backup storage of data, then the twins hadn’t gotten everything. Normally no one would have realized that there was a difference between online and offline databases, so the data would be safe. But if Desmarais was buying the company, they could do a more detailed search than anyone normally could.

“Now it could be just coincidence that they’re buying my company,” their father continued. “They own lots of companies. It’s mind-boggling how many they own. Edmond Desmarais is a very, very rich man.”

“They’ve given over three hundred million dollars to charities in New York City over the years,” their mother said.

How much of that was to the Museum of Natural History? If they’d given millions of dollars to the museum, it would explain why Yves Desmarais was walking around it as if he owned the place.

Their father nodded as if this proved something. “And it doesn’t mean that they had anything to do with the robbery. We have no proof, so we can’t go around saying that they did.”

The Flying Monkey at their school was proof that the Desmaraises were closing in on the twins, but Louise and Jillian had agreed not to mention him. Anything related to elves and baby dragons and magic was too dangerous to Nikola to bring to their parents’ attention.

“They took your toothbrushes because they wanted samples of your DNA!” Louise clung to the only proof they had to offer.

“Honey, you don’t know that.” Their father patted Louise on the head like she was still three.

Louise breathed out instead of screaming. “Why else would anyone steal toothbrushes?”

“That is damning, but it’s still not proof.” Their mother took four plates out of the dish cabinet and handed them to Louise. “Dinner is ready. We’re eating.”

Dinner was frozen lasagna, green beans, and a tossed salad. Simple. Inexpensive. Louise wondered what the Flying Monkey was having for dinner. Lobster? Steak? Were the Desmaraises making small talk of murder and kidnapping as they ate on fine china with real silverware instead of stainless steel? What were they planning? Why was Tristan at their school?

That night, Louise dreamed of the babies. They were playing in mud with nothing much more on than underwear. Brown hair and walnut skin and eyes full of mischief. They looked like peas in a pod, but she knew only one was a boy and three were girls. They had a string that they were making into one giant cat’s cradle. With their tiny little hands, they plucked at the strands, deftly changing the pattern.

“What are you doing?” Louise knelt beside the little boy that had to be Nikola, wondering what were the names of the three little girls.

“We were bored.” Nikola snuggled into her arms, puppy warm and soft, smelling of baby powder. “So we’re looking to see what we can find.”

The string shimmered between his fingers, and she realized it was fiber optics that they were weaving.

“Oh, you have to be careful. People can notice what you’re doing.”

“We’re being careful,” one of the little girls said. It was the same tone and cadence Jillian would have used a few years ago. Full of confidence, not always correct in her assessment of her abilities. “See.” The little girl held up a gleaming web run through her fingers. “This is Flying Monkey Five.”

When Louise peered at it, it was as if she were watching footage from a web camera. Tristan sat on a big leather couch that made him look all of six years old. He apparently was multitasking, with a tablet balanced on his bare knees and a headset linking him to a bigger screen that held the camera. The soft flickering glow of the television showed he was in a small ultramodern apartment furnished in stark, lean lines. A Power Rangers water bottle and a box of Chinese takeout sat on the coffee table in front of him. He blew a raspberry while considering the information displayed on the big screen. Then, shaking his head, he started to type, muttering, “If it was going to be easy, someone else could do it.”

“There he goes again,” another girl cried. “Dig. Dig. Dig. What is he looking for?”

“You’re spying on him?” Louise cried. “No, no, he’s dangerous!”

“We know!” they said in unison, although some said it with exasperation and others with fear.

“We want to help,” Nikola added. “We can do this.”

“We’ll be careful,” the girls promised in unison.

The babies started to sing then. “Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle. That’s the way the money goes, Pop! goes the weasel. Every night I get home, the monkey’s on the table, take a stick and knock it off, Pop! goes the weasel.”

“No, no, don’t knock him off the table. That will make him mad.”

Louise woke up. By the clock on the nightstand between her bed and Jillian’s, it was 4:26 a.m. She peered at it sleepily while she marveled at how vivid the dream had been. The alarm was set for 5:00 so they could feed Joy before her parents woke up. Should she even try to get to sleep again? The play was on next Wednesday and she hadn’t worked on it much, what with Joy, Nikola, and everything taking up her attention. She could spend the half hour making sure she was ready.

She sat up, stretching.

Nikola padded out of the darkness to snuggle into her arms. Unlike her dream, he felt of unyielding metal bones and hydraulic muscles, but at least his fur was the same warm softness. “Don’t worry, it’s just a song. We don’t really knock him off the table.”

She gasped. “You know what I dreamed?”

“Yes.” Nikola seemed to think it was perfectly natural for joint dreams. He pressed closer. “It was nice that you could come and visit us.”

“Do the others have names?”

“We’re discussing possibilities. We think Nikola Tesla Dufae is awesome. We all want great names, but we’re in disagreement as to what is cool.”

Nikola’s use of pronouns was now frighteningly clear. Louise had slipped into the idea that he was only one person, but in truth there were four little people trapped inside one very limited shell. Four lives that were dependent on her and Jillian. And even if they found someone who was willing to act as surrogate mother, there was a chance that only one or two of them would be born.

She hugged Nikola tightly. She had thought that if they got the embryos stored someplace safe, she and Jillian would have years to plan. Now she wanted to find a way to make them real as quickly as possible.

Nikola tilted his head as if listening to something distant. “Oh, my, that can’t be good.”

“What?”

“The monkey just looked up ‘how to build a bomb.’”