“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-thunk 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 did, 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-thunk her baseball again.
Louise opened her mouth to say “not in horror films” but realized that Jillian had lifted up the WWII escapee persona like a shield to protect herself. Making Jillian see the truth would only hurt her now. They couldn’t afford, though, to chase after an impossible dream. “Babies need a real mother. Not a woman who had poverty or some disaster that forced her into giving birth to children she doesn’t want. They need someone like our mom. Someone that wants children. Someone that can love them completely. Someone that can be patient and strong and wise…”
“They’ll have us.”
Louise hunched against a scream of denial. She felt so close to crumbling. She couldn’t bear the idea of being responsible for four real babies, each one as hungry as Joy, and as inquisitive as Nikola. Four Joy/Nikola all with poopy diapers? Louise couldn’t be their mother. The babies needed someone that wasn’t teetering on the edge. They deserved someone that didn’t feel so eggshell fragile that they were starting to wonder when, not if, they would break under the stress.
The twins needed to save the babies. It would destroy them both to lose the babies now. But be the babies’ parents? No, they couldn’t do that.
* * *
Louise woke up to a mischief of singing mice. Four of them stood on her pillow; one tapped her on the nose. When she opened her eyes, they began to sing in four-part harmony.
“Blue Moon,” the four mice sang. “You saw me standing alone. Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.”
“Nikola?” Louise rubbed at her eyes, wondering if she was dreaming. When she’d fallen asleep, there had been only one naked mouse robot. She had been struggling to fit fur onto it. Her sewing skills weren’t matching up to the task of creating the form-fitting skin.
No, she was awake, and there were definitely four white-furred mice sitting on her pillow. They each had a tiny scarf of different colored fabric wrapped about their necks. The one with a blue muffler waved its hand, identifying itself as her baby brother while the other three clapped their tiny paws. It was very cute in a slightly creepy kind of way.
She sat up, careful not to knock them from the pillow. “How did you…? There was only one… And it was naked.” She cautiously picked Nikola mouse up to peer closely at its skin. The rabbit fur had been perfectly joined together so she could barely see the seams.
The babies all started to talk at once.
“Joy fitted the skins,” Pink said.
“We printed more mice!” Red Gingham said.
“She used magic!” Green Velvet said.
“It was boring waiting to take turns!” Pink cried.
“They’re kind of cramped, even just for one,” Nikola squeaked. It was still Christopher Robin’s Welsh lilt but sonic high, thin, and fast.
“So we made one for each of us!” The girls chorused.
“Vroom! Vroom!” Pink cried. “We can run really fast!”
“And climb!” Green added.
“We can race!” Pink cried.
And the girls took off running in a lap around Tesla, making high-pitched motor noises. Tesla lay unearthly still. Louise had gotten used to the babies moving the dog’s body. It was even creepier to see the big robot sitting idle.