Wood Sprites(74)

Only pretending to look at the rest of the Alpha Centauri exhibit, Louise focused just on the building. The hallway was one long, wide vaguely boot-shaped corridor. There were only two openings, the toe into the reptile exhibit and the cuff into stair tower that faced West 77th Street.

According to emails between curators, it would take a week for the colony exhibit to be packed up and shipped to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The space would be cleaned as the Elfhome exhibit arrived from the Australian Museum in Sydney. The AMNH had scheduled a week to unpack and arrange the incoming display cases. During that time, Dufae’s chest would arrive from Paris, escorted by an assistant registrar. On June fourteenth, the exhibit would open to the public.

At the end of June, the frozen embryos would be thrown away.

It gave them less than a month between the time that Dufae’s box arrived in the United States and the last possible day to save their siblings. That narrow window opened in approximately twenty days. They had to be ready to slip into that opening and take what they needed.

At the end of the gallery, they continued through to the primates and then circled around through the North American birds, the New York State mammals and city birds and finally down through the African mammals to end up where they had started. In the loop, the twins documented the two flights of stairs, the three elevators, the up and down escalators and the only restrooms on the floor. Since the access routes were grouped together into two tight knots, they only represented two main ways up to the level. A close examination of the map, however, showed that only one went all the way down to the lower level and access to the subway.

So while Jillian kept Aunt Kitty busy in the gift shop, Louise quickly mapped the second and first floor with Tesla. She noticed how many guards were walking around and the care that the staff was taking checking bags coming in and out of the museum. Even in the middle of the week with the recent bombing canceling all school trips and most people’s travel plans, there were nearly a hundred visitors scattered among the floors. The twins couldn’t hope to set up the generator, open the box, take out what they needed and get it locked again without a visitor seeing them. Obviously they were going to have to stage the robbery after hours.

The idea of sneaking around like cat burglars was at once thrilling and nerve-wracking. How in the world were they going to steal the nactka out of the Dufae box?

* * *

Louise returned to the gift shop to find that Jillian had picked out a souvenir slickie on the Alpha Centauri exhibit. Louise never saw the point of slickies. They weren’t connected to the Internet so there was no way to share the data. They were barely indexed so finding anything was a pain. And they often cut costs by making photos two dimensional instead of three dimensional with panning and rotation. She supposed that it allowed you to give something tangible as a gift instead of giving the “ethereal” download of a real book.

“You want that?” They’d planned on getting something in a box that was approximately the same size as a nactka, just in case they needed to get one through security the day of the robbery. Of course, they had to guess at the size.

“Yes.” Jillian gave her a look that said Louise was to play along even if she didn’t understand. Jillian held out the slickie flat on her left palm and flipped the digital pages with her right index finger. There might have been hundreds of colonists that went to Alpha Centauri but judging by the quick flow of images, the only one that mattered was Captain Jin Wong. “It’s all videos they took of building the gate and the ships and training of the crews.” Jillian paused on the picture of Esme. Whereas the photo upstairs had shown her to be blonde, this picture had her hair dyed a rich purple, the kind that only came with an expensive professional job. She hovered in mid-air, the Earth a blaze of brilliant blue behind her. She glared at the camera like she was going to plow it over. There was a bandage on her right temple, unexplained by the caption that read simply: Esme Shenske, Captain of the Dahe Hao, during final days of her training. “Isn’t it cool?”

Judging by the fact that all the Chinese children held one or two in their hands as they lined up at the check-out counter, maybe it was.

“Are you sure?” Louise had hoped the finding the right-sized object didn’t fall to her.

“Yes. And I saw some snow globes you might like.”

Louise followed Jillian, cringing inside. People were going to start thinking she loved snow globes if she picked out a second one for her birthday. The Pittsburgh on Earth/Elfhome one had coolness factor that she doubted could be topped. A snow globe, though, would require a box.