Wood Sprites

2: The Best-Laid Plans

Their parents had insisted on calling the building in the backyard the girls’ “playhouse” despite the fact it was actually a storage shed. Made of dried lumber and asphalt shingles, it had proved to be quite flammable. All that was left was a skeleton of blackened studs. Their father was dismantling it with a reciprocating saw.

“We want to know more,” Jillian called to him over the growl of the blade.

“More?” their father echoed. He had soot smeared across his pale cheeks like war paint. On another father, it would probably look cool, but it only made him look silly. The strap on his safety glasses worked his straw-blond hair into spikes, standing up at every conceivable angle. His eyebrows were cocked into an extremely puzzled look. Their mother liked to use his expressions as proof that it was possible to get your face stuck in silly-looking poses. He looked like a startled hedgehog.

“We want to know about our siblings,” Louise said.

“Your what?” His mystified look changed to slight panic. He narrowly avoided cutting his left hand with the saw blade and had to turn off the power tool for his own safety.

“Our sisters!” Jillian cried, still at the volume to be heard over the now silent saw.

“And our brother.” Odds were that at least one of their siblings would a boy. “We read up on in vitro fertilization. We know that we probably have two or three siblings, if not more.”

“We could have dozens!” Jillian cried.

Their father was shaking his head while trying to wave off their questions. “No. No. What are you doing back here? It’s dangerous. Go back in the house. You could have been killed in this shed. You were lucky that you weren’t trapped in here.”

They hadn’t been because they’d used an old coffee table as a blast shield. They had stood it on end, its legs against the double doors that opened outward. The explosion had smashed the table through the doorway. They were lucky that the thick legs kept them from being squashed between the two pieces of heavy wood. So far, no one had realized the significance of the heavily charred coffee table out in the middle of the yard.

“Daddy!” Jillian used the ultimate cute attack. “If you had a brother or a sister, wouldn’t you want to know?”

Their father melted visibly but remained steadfast. “Yes, I would. I always wanted a brother or sister. But those records are kept confidential. They’re secret.”

“Why?” Jillian was actually asking why he’d let anything like policy stand in his way. Since he worked at the clinic, it should be easy for him to get the information.

He misunderstood. “It’s for our protection. This way, no one can come and. . and. .”

“And?”

“Get visitation rights for you.”

They understood custody battles; several of their classmates had had their lives implode via a divorce. Their situation didn’t seem to fit that scenario.

“Why would anyone do that?” Louise asked.

“You and Mom aren’t getting divorced, are you?” Jillian asked and did a lip quiver that may or may not have been real.

“No. No. Your mother and I are happy. It’s just when people can’t have other children, or they have children and lose them in some way, they’re desperate enough to use the law to take what really isn’t theirs in the first place.”

Louise exchanged a glance with Jillian. They hadn’t considered “other parents,” only “other siblings.” “And the law would actually allow that?”

“Yes, honey. The law tries to be fair to everyone, but in trying to cover all the bases, it ends up being grossly unfair to some people. It is possible, even though your mother carried you for nine months and you’ve been our daughters for nine years, that the court may think the little bit of genetic material we. . we used is enough to warrant someone else rights to you.”

The truly frightening thing was that their father always sugarcoated everything. Somehow he never understood that they were constantly growing up; in his mind they were stuck somewhere between the ages of three and four. That he was admitting this much meant there was much more that he wasn’t telling them.

Their mother was in full African warrior-queen mode in the laundry room, dealing with her smoke-laden cardigan while she growled at someone on her headset.

“The only exploding car in my backyard is a Barbie Glam Convertible.” She shoved the cardigan deeper into the wash water as if thinking about holding someone’s head under the suds. It made Louise edge slightly back. Now probably wasn’t the best time to talk to their mother.

“I do think that while the demonstrations against the E.I.A. zone expansion are going on that checking for car bombs at the dinner is perfectly reasonable. Anna Desmarais is a complete loon, though, if she thinks my nine-year-olds are terrorists. You tell Taliaferro that if she goes after my girls, I will come down there and set her—” Their mother noticed them standing at the door and winced. “Short hairs on fire.”

With a flick of the wrist and a jangle of gold bracelets, she tried to banish them away so she could use real harsh language. They edged back so that they weren’t in the room proper but they could still see her rinsing out her cardigan.

She knew that they were still in earshot; she gave a long angry hiss instead of swearing. “She is not a nice little old lady, she is a hedge-fund manager and one of the best. She’s a shark; if she smiled a little wider, you’d see how sharp her teeth are. Oh, she hates me just as much as I hate her; we’re just both very good at smiling and pretending that everything is just peachy.”

Their mother worked in events planning for charities. In some ways, it was a glamorous job as it involved throwing bright and glittering parties for the city’s richest. It meant, however, that their mother was constantly faced with drop-dead deadlines and unexpected emergencies. She was quite good at it since, as an African warrior queen, she was forceful and unbending while extremely polite.

“Jillian needed three stitches.” Their mother sniffed the cardigan to see if she had gotten out the smell of smoke from the fine wool. “Louise had half of her hair burnt off. Other than that, they only have minor scrapes and bruises from head to toe. They spent the night at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.” She paused as the other side asked a question that made her glare at them in the doorway. “It was a dust explosion! Look it up; I had to.” She huffed with impatience. “Flour, when airborne in high concentrations, can explode. Flour. The white stuff in cookies and cakes. Tell Taliaferro to tell Desmarais that the fire department already has ruled it was an accident.” Another huff of impatience. “My girls videoed the whole thing, and the footage cleared them of everything but stupidity. Yes, the joy of raising children. Said children want their mother, I have to go.”

She laid her sweater on the drying rack and pulled off her gloves. Their mother held up her elegant hand as if giving benediction. “I love you two dearly,” she said calmly. “I would kill anyone that tried to harm you. I would lay down my life to protect you. But — this — is — not — a good time to push me.”

Louise swallowed hard. Jillian held out her hand, and they laced their fingers tightly together.

“No, no, no.” Their mother waved her finger at them. “Don’t do that The Shining twin dead girls on me.”

Louise squeezed Jillian’s hand tight and then reluctantly let it go. “Mom, we wanted to know. Could you and Dad go back to the embryo bank and use what’s still in storage so we can have little sisters and brothers?”

Their mother took a deep breath and sighed it out. She didn’t like to give them her knee-jerk reactions, but it sometimes took her a few minutes before she could find safe answers. This took longer than usual, and it was simply, “No.”

“Why?” Jillian pushed when she shouldn’t have.

Their mother caught hold of them to grip them both fiercely. “Having a child is not just getting knocked up and spitting it out into the world! You are responsible for every moment of that child’s life until it can take legal accountability for itself — which with some poor souls is never. Besides adequate food, clothing, and schooling, you must lavish it with love and affection tempered with discipline. Your father and I made that commitment to you two. We do not have the resources to reasonably extend that to other children, no matter how much we would love to have more. So the answer is no.”

They nodded and escaped up the stairs. At the top of the steps, though, Jillian paused to look back with her mouth rounded into a silent “Oh” of surprise.

“What?” Louise whispered.

“Lou, they thought about having more. That means there’s other leftovers still waiting to be born.”

Late that night, they lay in their beds as gleaming stars slowly crawled across their ceiling. The holographic, completely accurate, star field was one of the many expensive birthday gifts that their parents had surprised them with over the years. It had a “lullaby” mode where an AI with Carl Sagan’s voice gave astronomy lessons as constellations rose in the east. Louise couldn’t understand why their parents hadn’t saved their money and gotten more children instead.

“If there are leftovers, we need to do something.” Jillian was waving her arms in the darkness. Louise could only see them moving, though, as they rapidly eclipsed the stars. “Big things. Maybe illegal things. They’re our little sisters.”

“And baby brother.” Because odds were that at least one was a boy. “But we don’t know for sure if they’re still at Dad’s work.”

“Where would they go? They’re popsicles!”

“They might have been born to someone else,” Louise pointed out the obvious.

“You heard Mom. .”

“They thought about having more and decided to pass on the others. The reason Dad talked about confidentiality might mean someone used the embryos and they’re someone else’s kids now.”

“But they’re still going to be like us,” Jillian said. “Short and brown and smart. .”

“And weird.”

“We are not weird. We just think outside the box.”

“Way outside.”

“So if they’ve been born, we can watch over them from a distance. And if they haven’t been born, make sure they’re safe.”

Louise blew her breath out in irritation. “If they’re not safe at Dad’s work, what are we going to do? It’s not like we can stick them in our fridge behind the ice cream. If for some reason they’re not ‘safe’ at Dad’s work, the only thing we could do is to implant them into someone. I don’t know ‘who,’ and I’m not totally sure ‘how.’ I’ve read all those links about implantation, but those pictures just don’t make total sense to me. Really there’s nothing between my legs that looks like that and certainly nothing down there is big enough for a baby to come out of.”

“It’s because we’re nine. That’s where puberty comes in. We change.”

Louise wasn’t totally sure about that. She really wished their father hadn’t passed out while filming their birth; the video would have been more instructive without the ten minutes of video of the birthing room’s floor. Their father missed the whole “come out” part of their birth. “And what are we going to do with the babies afterwards? We can’t just show up with them and say we found them. We tried that with the kittens and it didn’t work.”

A pillow came sailing across from Jillian’s bed and hit Louise in the face. “Ow!”

“Don’t be a stupid ass.” Jillian’s voice was muffled by the pillow over Louise’s head. “We didn’t know Daddy was allergic.”

Louise tossed the pillow back. “Don’t say ‘ass.’ This is just like the kittens times a zillion.”

“Don’t be a stupid butt. Before we start getting all worked up about anything, we need to figure out first if there’s anything to go all emo about.”

Jillian had a point. If someone else had claimed the embryos, then they wouldn’t have to deal with figuring out how to get their siblings born. Louise slipped quietly out of bed, got her tablet off her desk, and climbed under her blankets before turning it on.

“What are you doing?” Jillian whispered.

“Checking Mom and Dad’s computers. They probably have some kind of records on this.”

A moment later, Jillian climbed into bed with her. “Any records they have are probably going to be dated from before we’re born.”

With the sheets tented over them, they hacked into their parents’ personal files. On their mother’s computer they found medical records listing doctor visits and seemingly endless tests on both their parents. The terminology slowed them down, requiring detours to look up words and procedures. The records did prove that their parents had tried for years to have babies without success.

The only information they could find on their conception was the genetic profiles of their donors. The man was listed as white, nonreligious, no known hereditary diseases, father alive, mother killed in a car accident, master level of education obtained. The woman was also listed as white, Jewish, no known hereditary disease, mother alive, father murdered, doctorate level of education obtained.

“Well, that explains why we do the Hanukah lights at Christmas.” Jillian sighed with disappointment. “But I thought for sure we were at least a little African-American. Why are we so brown?”

“I don’t know.” Louise double-checked everything they’d searched for. “There are no names or even lot numbers on this information. We’re going to have to hack Dad’s company.”

Hacking their father’s computer wasn’t as hard as it sounded since their father was a dangerously predictable man. Most of his passwords were something of sentimental value and the date associated with them. The work password was Paris16, their parents’ honeymoon.

Once they were in, though, it was difficult to figure out what exactly they were looking for. There were thousands of frozen embryos stored, all cross-referenced with client numbers. Their parents weren’t on the client database.

“Why aren’t they on the list?” Jillian asked.

“Maybe because they didn’t put anything into storage, they just took stuff out.”

They found information on people who paid for implanting embryos that had been donated, but their parents weren’t on that list, either.

“Maybe they lied about all this,” Louise said.

“Or it wasn’t us they were lying to,” Jillian whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“What if they stole the embryos? It could be why Dad is all worried about confidentiality.”

“If they stole our embryos. .” Louise stared at the maze of interlocking databases, all feeding information from one to another. They weren’t looking for a reported incident, but the lack of one. “Here. This database shows the date that the embryos are stored and the dates they were accessed. If we count nine months back from our birthday, we have a date range when our parents would have taken us.”

Jillian counted back on her fingers. “We were born in April. March. February. January. December. November. October. September. August. July?”

“Let’s check from June to August, the year before we were born, just to be sure,” Louise said. “I don’t know how exact that nine-month thing is. People are always talking about premature babies.”

There were only a dozen possible batches.

“I would have thought there would be more,” Jillian said. “How are they staying in business?”

“The success rate of the first implant is high for Dad’s clinic. It’s at seventy percent. The leftovers are stored and used only if the first implant fails, or basically just thirty percent of the clients.”

Jillian scanned the dozen listings. “It only shows which embryos were accessed. It doesn’t give who pulled them and how they were used.”

“Just give me a minute.” Louise checked through the other databases. “Billing includes embryo batch numbers. That way the company can keep track of who gets what without worrying about confidentiality. Since our parents didn’t pay, our batch number will be the only one that doesn’t have a matching invoice. There.”

“First, who are our genetic donors?” Jillian chased the information through the databases. “They’re the ones we have to be careful around since they probably think we’re their kids and we’re most definitely not! Huh. What does ‘the estate of’ mean?”

“How should I know?” Louise was digging through the storage records, trying to find out how many embryos had been stored, what had been taken out, and what remained.

“Ah!” Jillian made the sound of discovery. “Estate means it belongs to dead people.”

“Our donors are dead?”

“It looks like it.”

“Maybe that’s what Dad meant by ‘they have children and lose them in some way.’ It’s not our donors that Mom and Dad are worried about, but our donors’ parents.”

“Oh my God! Lou! Our sperm donor was Leonardo DaVinci Dufae.”

“You’re kidding!” Louise leaned over to stare at Jillian’s screen.

Dufae was the most well-known inventor of their time. He invented a hyperphase gate that the Chinese built in orbit. They intended to use it to jump colonists to a planet around another star. If it had worked as expected, Dufae probably would have remained obscure. What made him famous was the fact that the gate malfunctioned in a spectacular fashion.

Every time the gate was turned on, Pittsburgh disappeared off Earth and traveled to Elfhome, the world of elves. Luckily, every time the gate was turned off, Pittsburgh returned. Basically, the Chinese had turned a major American city into a giant interdimensional yo-yo.

Earth was nearly plunged into global warfare over whether or not the gate should continue to operate. The biggest problem was that Dufae had died before the gate’s first activation. Other scientists couldn’t figure out how his gate worked, so they couldn’t simply tweak his design to something less inconvenient. No one really wanted to break contact with Elfhome completely. After a great deal of heated negotiations, an awkward schedule of turning the gate on and off, or Startups and Shutdowns, was established.

“That is so cool!” Louise whispered. “But he’s been dead for forever. Maybe before Mom and Dad were even born!”

“Lou,” Jillian whispered. “Leonardo DaVinci Dufae is our father.”

“He was just a sperm donor and he’s dead,” Louise pointed out again. “Who donated the egg? His wife?”

The egg donor was Esme Shenske. They didn’t recognize the name, but the Internet did. She was the captain of the third colony ship, the Dahe Hao. The holographic star-field ceiling, complete with astronomy lessons, suddenly made sense.

“Wow. Our donors are famous,” Jillian said.

“Were famous. He’s dead and she’s at Alpha Centauri or someplace like that. What the hell happened to our older sisters? Did they go to Alpha Centauri with her?”

After some digging they found that the first batch of embryos had been inserted into April Geiselman of Pittsburgh exactly nine months prior to Esme Shenske leaving the Solar System.

“That means our older sisters are eighteen next month,” Louise said. “But where are they? Did Esme take them with her? Or did they stay in Pittsburgh with Geiselman?”

“I’m looking,” Jillian said. “What about our baby sisters?”

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.”