Was she really in the museum’s proverbial back door?
She flipped her phone to the GPS screen and checked.
She was.
How had she managed that?
And where was Jillian?
She checked her twin’s coordinates. According to Jillian’s phone, she was just a few feet away.
“Are you okay?” Jillian texted.
Louise had to try three times to type a simple yes and then twice to send “here.”
“Me or you?” Jillian texted. They both had an exit kit just in case they were separated and needed to escape quickly.
“You.” Louise tapped in. She was so rattled that she screwed the spelling up but autocorrect fixed it.
“Ok. Keep watch.”
As far as they could determine, the museum had a maze of office areas and work spaces tucked between the windowless visitor areas and the building’s façade that showed four stories of windows. They had picked their exit point because it was one of the few places where they were sure that the interior wall actually gave direct access to the outdoors and not into “staff only” area. The sleek modern pavilion was one giant cube of glass.
With muffled thumps and quiet mutters, Jillian got the Hoberman mega sphere out of her backpack, shoved it under the bottom of her box, and flicked it to expand the tight bundle of plastic into a brightly colored, four and half foot wide, loosely woven ball. Louise winced slightly as the sphere seemed to appear out of nowhere on the museum security monitors. They had practiced this, but they weren’t totally sure it would work. They hadn’t used it to get in since they hadn’t figured out a way to keep the sphere invisible while using it to breach a wall.
Jillian’s disembodied hand turned the ball so that the loop threaded with wire was lined up with the window. With the soft murmur of Elvish, Jillian activated the spell. Another slight push, and the loop slid into the glass and the glass temporarily vanished. Then came the scary part, actually stepping through the loop, box and all. The spell affected only what it was touching at the moment at activation, but Louise couldn’t help but imagine that they would end up in the quantum space where the glass molecules were suspended.
“I’m through,” Jillian called from outside.
Louise carefully lined her box up with the loop and stepped through. “Okay, I’m out.”
Jillian’s hand appeared and jerked the loop out of the glass and canceled the spell. “It’s out. Let’s go!”
Louise checked the security camera feed. It showed the glass back in place and the multicolor ball bouncing away as it trailed behind Jillian, still connected by the wire. With a quiet thud and a muted “oomph” Jillian hit a tree and bounced off it.
Wincing, Louise checked the other security cameras. There were no guards heading toward the Columbus Street Exit, so no one must have noticed the ball for the minute it was inside the museum. Breathing out with relief, Louise followed after Jillian into the wooded safety of Theodore Roosevelt Park.
22: SURROGATE MOM
April Geiselman jerked open the door. She was in a bathrobe and her makeup was weirdly smeared. She glared down at them. “What are you doing here? It’s after dark. Do your parents know where you are?”
“We need help.” Jillian slipped past her into the apartment. Tesla followed Jillian in, unstoppable as a tank. They’d safely retrieved him from Jin Wong’s statue. The mini-Tesla was still in school, broadcasting from their locker.
“Alexander is in big trouble. We need to warn her!” Louise ducked around April the other way.
“Some people want to kidnap her!” Jillian cried.
“Hey! Wait!” April cried. “You can’t come in; I have—what?”
“We were at the museum—and we heard these people talking about Alexander.” Louise realized that they probably shouldn’t dwell too much on where they heard all this and certainly never mention when. “They said they’re going to kidnap her! We need to warn her but we don’t know how!”
“Okay, okay, calm down.” April made calming motions with her hands. “Who are ‘they’ and where is she? I thought she was still on Elfhome.”
“We don’t know who ‘they’ are!” the twins cried, and Louise added. “At least not all of them.”
A tall figure in the hallway brought the conversation to a halt. The shirtless man had lipstick smeared across part of his face and his hair sticking out every which way. “April? What’s going on? Whose kids are these?”
They all gaped at him for a moment.
April finally broke the silence by pointing at him. “Stephen! They’re—They’re—It’s complicated. Look, I’m really sorry but this is going to be a while. Can—Can we do this another time?”