“Let me put my kids on the express and then I’ll be back.”
He kissed them both on top of their heads. “Go home. Straight home. I’ll be tracking Tesla and will be worried until I see he’s home.”
Jillian barely waited for their father to be out of earshot. “You got it?”
Louise nodded, watching Tesla’s head twist and turn. The subway train came rumbling in and the robotic dog shuddered and pressed up against her.
“Come on, boy.” She patted the wide shoulder. “Keep it together until we get home.”
If Tesla broke down before then, they were going to have a complete mess on their hands. There was no way they could abandon such an expensive machine on the subway system, but if they had to call their parents, they could discover everything.
She pulled Tesla toward the subway train and, as the door opened, dragged him on board. “Just a little longer, Tesla. Please. We need to get home.”
By the time they hit their stop, Tesla was walking in a wavering line, drifting this way and that on the sidewalk. As they neared the house, Louise stopped being worried about getting home and started to feel bad for the robotic dog. What if they’d totally broken him so he couldn’t be fixed? She’d thought she would be happy to be free from an ever-present spy, but the idea of him going away completely was making her eyes burn.
At the corner of their street, he came to a complete halt.
“Tesla!” she cried.
“Stupid dog.” Jillian caught him by the collar and tried to pull him toward their house.
The dog flinched. “But it’s so big!” he said in his Christopher Robin voice. “It just keeps going and going. And where is this home we’re going to? How far away is it?”
“Tesla?” Louise said.
He cocked his head. “What? We think it’s a reasonable question. We want to stop and see something. Everything is so interesting, but we keep on moving! Why can’t we stop here and look, just for a minute?”
“Oh. My. God,” Jillian whispered as Louise stared open-mouthed at the dog.
There was movement in Louise’s pocket. Joy poked her head out. “Strawberry.”
Tesla cocked his head at the baby dragon. “Hello.”
“Hello!” Joy patted Tesla’s black nose inches from her. “Who’s there?”
Louise took a deep breath as she remembered that Joy had said the same phrase in the storage room as she pointed at the vial holding the babies. “Oh.”
“We think our name is Nikola Tesla.” He tilted his head the other direction. “Or that might be just my name and. . and the others have their own names. We’re not in agreement about that.”
Nikola Tesla explored their room, clumsily handling everything with his awkward dog paws. They rescued their tablets, the lamp on the nightstand between their beds, their alarm clock, and their matching china piggy banks. Nikola Tesla paused to examine his front feet. “Why do our hands look like this?”
“Because you’re a dog,” Jillian said.
“We are?”
“Well, at the moment, you are,” Louise said. “It’s complicated.”
Which seemed to be the theme for their life lately.
Nikola tried to pick up their new camera and nearly dropped it. Louise yelped and snatched it out of his paws. He gazed up at her with puppy-dog eyes. “We want to look at it.”
Louise was sure April Geiselman would label this as karma. They wanted their baby brother and sisters so bad, and now they had them, with all the chaos that implied. How, though, mystified Louise. Somehow magic had weirdly combined the frozen embryos and the robotic brain of Tesla. It seemed impossible, but there was no denying that Nikola was a whole different creature than their nanny-bot.
Louise held the camera down to Nikola’s eye level and wondered how differently he might be seeing the object. “It might break if you drop it. Let me hold it while you look at it.”
“So, you’re a boy?” Jillian moved around the room, putting treasures away while Louise kept the dog — puppy — boy — babies — distracted.
Tesla peered closely at the camera, tilting his massive head back and forth. “What’s a boy?”
Jillian gave Louise a pleading look for her to answer the question. Louise shrugged; she had no idea how to explain when the person in question lacked any reasonable body parts.
Jillian tugged at her hair in frustration. “A boy is — someone who is not a girl.”
“What is a girl?”
“We’re girls.” Louise tried to head off that route of questioning.
“Well, then, we must be a boy, because we’re not you.”
“That works,” Jillian and Louise agreed.
Nikola was distracted from the camera by the snow globe of the hyperphase gate in orbit over Earth. (The Elfhome one was the first thing Jillian had put up out of reach.) He gave a little “oh” of amazement when the glitter swirled. Louise struggled not to snatch the globe out of his paws. She really didn’t like it that much; it still felt vaguely dangerous to her for some reason. She supposed it could be worse; there could be four babies fumbling through the twins’ belongings, in mass confusion.
