She found several places still selling adapters and winced at the price. It wasn’t expensive, but it still was a lot more than she had left in her mobile payment account. Louise checked Jillian’s account to see if they could pool their money. “We don’t have enough money.”
Jillian winced. “It’s going to take weeks to have enough with our allowance.”
“If Mom and Dad don’t dock us for cost of the playhouse.”
“Shhh!” Jillian whispered. “Don’t give them ideas.”
“Maybe we can sell something.”
“No,” Jillian said. “All we have left after the fire is our video processing equipment, and we’re not selling that. We don’t know what’s on the flash drive and it might be useless crap.” She glared at the photos, the flash drive, and the scrap of paper with the cryptic warning. “Our stupid genetic donor.”
6: MERMAID GAMBIT
They had an older sister. Better yet, she wasn’t some beauty pageant poser like Elle Pondwater, she was a super cool gearhead. She lived on Elfhome. She probably knew Elvish. And their grandfather understood magic, so she might even know some real spells. She couldn’t get more perfect unless she also had all sorts of interesting pets. She could own an elfhound. Or a horse! According to April and old satellite maps of Pittsburgh prior to first Shutdown, the hotel where Alexander lived could house an entire zoo.
It was at once terrifying and intoxicating to think that they could actually call their older sister and talk to her. Maybe she could figure out a solution to how to save their baby siblings.
Every thirty days, the Chinese turned off the hyperphase gate (invented by their male genetic donor) and Pittsburgh returned to Earth. Initially Shutdown had been the first of the month. While the thirty-day cycle had worked for September, April, June and November, all the other months and half-dozen leap years pushed Shutdown to some illogical date currently falling in the middle of the month.
It made for an interesting self-imposed deadline for their videos, so they kept a counter running on their site. Louise jumped to their Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo site to find out when the next Shutdown was scheduled. While it would only be a few days until they could contact Alexander, it seemed forever.
And there was the niggling problem that they didn’t have a phone number for Alexander. Apparently at some point Tim Bell had changed his phone number and April had taken it as a sign that she was not to call his house. Trying to find any information out about Pittsburgh was much like being a jewel thief. Even the most mundane of information was hidden away. They had to routinely hack into secure databases to get what they needed for their videos. They usually copied anything they could get away with, but up to this point, they hadn’t needed a telephone list.
Louise glanced at the time. She had ten minutes until their mother expected them to be eating breakfast. She might have time to find a copy, especially if she got lucky and it was on one of their favorite sites. A band of anonymous hackers ran a data haven, posting information on Pittsburgh they’d “found” in undisclosed locations. As always, she made sure that she couldn’t be traced before dropping into the forum.
The first post made her heart jump. The heading was “Looking for Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.” She sat staring at it with fear. Should she read the post? Who in the world even knew that they visited this forum?
Taking a breath, she opened the post. It was breezy in tone, meandering in points, and signed with a name that made her squeak in surprise.
“What?”
“Nigel Reid wants to talk to us.”
“Nigel Reid? You mean ‘I just love Nigel’ Nigel Reid?”
“I never said that!” She respected the filmmaker. He was her favorite naturalist. “But yes, that one.”
Jillian squeaked too. “Seriously? Talk to us?”
“Yes. Well. Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. He’s seen The Queen’s Pantaloons and wants to know if the gossamer call is real. He’s coming to New York to do the Today Show and he wants to know if he can meet us.”
“Meet him? Like in person?”
“Generally that’s what ‘meet’ means.”
“Are you nuts? You know that Mom and Dad would just freak if they found out that we were going to meet some old guy from the Internet. They’ll get him arrested as a pedophile!”
“He wants to meet with a film production company!” Louise cried in defense. “He doesn’t know Lemon-Lime is just two kids. If he did think we were kids, he probably thinks we’re in high school or college.”
“Pfft, high school is just as bad. Besides, we don’t know if this is really Nigel Reid posting this. It could be anyone. We list him as one of our influences. By posing as him, anyone could hope to lure us out.”