Wood Sprites(82)

Mr. Kessler flicked his hand toward the door and started for the teacher’s desk.

Louise hurried to their locker and stuffed it into Tesla’s storage compartment. What could they tell Mr. Kessler? Did they have to tell him anything? He seemed not to really care what the generator did, which was weird. Why would he even give it to her until he knew what it did? She was glad he did, but it seemed stupid of him.

“Seamus!” Mr. Howe barked in his classroom across the hall. “Sit!”

Oh. Yes. Mr. Howe had told Mr. Kessler not to bully the twins. Apparently Mr. Kessler was worried that breaking the fake generator would be considered being intentionally mean to Louise. He was making sure that everything was good before the joint stagecraft class, where Louise would have to give Mr. Howe a report of her progress or lack thereof. Eek! They didn’t make a second fake generator! They just assumed that Mr. Kessler would report the first one smashed and that would be the end of it. Oh, how could they be so stupid? Of course, one way or another, they’d have to produce an unsmashed fake generator because they had said it was necessary to put on the play! If she took the magic generator upstairs during stagecraft, Mr. Howe would insist it be stored with the rest of the play equipment—which was the whole point of having the fake in the first place. She needed a fake and she needed it to be able to do something demonstrable.

What could it do?

She leaned against the cool metal of her locker, thinking. Something to do with the play that she had overlooked but would seem vital. The holographic projectors were to deal with the mermaids. What else was Peter Pan canon? Pixie dust? No, they were going to go with just glitter and that was the most intelligent method. Wait—Tinker Bell! Traditionally the fairy was represented just by a pin spotlight and a shimmer of bells as the character spoke. The twins were going to do a traditional Tinker Bell, but they could do it bigger.

She hurried back to her desk. Mr. Kessler glanced at her as she came in but didn’t stop his lecture on spreadsheets. She quickly checked his class schedule for the next few periods. As she’d hoped, he was floating from class to class today, spending the next four periods on the lower floors. It’d be unlikely he’d climb the eight flights up to the art rooms.

She then quickly checked a run time on a hybrid projector. Only three hours. Good. It gave her forty minutes to spare. If there was a teacher mode on the printer, then she should actually be able to load the program remotely. (Since the school was filled with gifted students, it really should have a beefier security system. She and Jillian had hacked in as first graders and set up a back door that no one had seemed to notice in the last five years.)

She winced at the printer’s log that showed who had accessed the printer and copies of the programs they ran. Judging the few times that the printer was used, Mr. Kessler really did see the printer as “his.” In the last month, she and Mr. Kessler were the only ones using it. It felt wrong to leave any evidence of the magic generator anywhere in the school system, so she changed the log, swapping out the magic generator program with the hybrid projector.

Twenty-three minutes later, she started the print job. Once the printer was finished, she would delete out all evidence that she—or rather Mr. Kessler—printed anything new. The only hard thing left was getting the hybrid projector off the 3D printer and into storage with the other play items. Since the entire class saw Mr. Kessler hand her the magic generator, she had fourteen witnesses that she had to go to the art room.

The end-of-period bell rang and she followed Mr. Kessler out the door and watched him head to the stairs. His next class was with the second graders, two flights down, but he did have time to run upstairs and back.

“Go down. Go down,” she whispered.

He paused at the stairs, checked his watch, and trotted downwards.

“Oh, thank god.” She collapsed against the wall with relief.

Jillian was grinning hugely.

“What?” Louise asked.

“We’ve got a second generator!” Jillian whispered. “It means we both can go to the museum.”

Louise gasped. She hadn’t even considered that side of things. “But it’s all useless if France doesn’t send the box.”

“They’ll send it.” Jillian’s grin didn’t waver. “Even if we have to get tricky about it.”

* * *

A full agonizing ten days later, the EIA talked France into sending just the box. Suddenly they had seventy-two hours to be ready to rob a world-famous museum.





21: KNOCK, KNOCK, OPEN THE BOX


Louise felt like she was going to be sick. She was so nervous her stomach was a queasy roil. At the same time she couldn’t stop grinning widely. They were going to do it, actually rob a museum like two cat burglars.