When Louise peered at it, it was as if she were watching footage from a web camera. Tristan sat on a big leather couch that made him look all of six years old. He apparently was multitasking, with a tablet balanced on his bare knees and a headset linking him to a bigger screen that held the camera. The soft flickering glow of the television showed he was in a small ultramodern apartment furnished in stark, lean lines. A Power Rangers water bottle and a box of Chinese takeout sat on the coffee table in front of him. He blew a raspberry while considering the information displayed on the big screen. Then, shaking his head, he started to type, muttering, “If it was going to be easy, someone else could do it.”
“There he goes again,” another girl cried. “Dig. Dig. Dig. What is he looking for?”
“You’re spying on him?” Louise cried. “No, no, he’s dangerous!”
“We know!” they said in unison, although some said it with exasperation and others with fear.
“We want to help,” Nikola added. “We can do this.”
“We’ll be careful,” the girls promised in unison.
The babies started to sing then. “Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle. That’s the way the money goes, Pop! goes the weasel. Every night I get home, the monkey’s on the table, take a stick and knock it off, Pop! goes the weasel.”
“No, no, don’t knock him off the table. That will make him mad.”
Louise woke up. By the clock on the nightstand between her bed and Jillian’s, it was 4:26 a.m. She peered at it sleepily while she marveled at how vivid the dream had been. The alarm was set for 5:00 so they could feed Joy before her parents woke up. Should she even try to get to sleep again? The play was on next Wednesday and she hadn’t worked on it much, what with Joy, Nikola, and everything taking up her attention. She could spend the half hour making sure she was ready.
She sat up, stretching.
Nikola padded out of the darkness to snuggle into her arms. Unlike her dream, he felt of unyielding metal bones and hydraulic muscles, but at least his fur was the same warm softness. “Don’t worry, it’s just a song. We don’t really knock him off the table.”
She gasped. “You know what I dreamed?”
“Yes.” Nikola seemed to think it was perfectly natural for joint dreams. He pressed closer. “It was nice that you could come and visit us.”
“Do the others have names?”
“We’re discussing possibilities. We think Nikola Tesla Dufae is awesome. We all want great names, but we’re in disagreement as to what is cool.”
Nikola’s use of pronouns was now frighteningly clear. Louise had slipped into the idea that he was only one person, but in truth there were four little people trapped inside one very limited shell. Four lives that were dependent on her and Jillian. And even if they found someone who was willing to act as surrogate mother, there was a chance that only one or two of them would be born.
She hugged Nikola tightly. She had thought that if they got the embryos stored someplace safe, she and Jillian would have years to plan. Now she wanted to find a way to make them real as quickly as possible.
Nikola tilted his head as if listening to something distant. “Oh, my, that can’t be good.”
“What?”
“The monkey just looked up ‘how to build a bomb.’”
Tristan waited for them at the train station. Except for one yawn, there was no evidence he’d been up late, endlessly digging through the Internet. The twins tried to act surprised and not annoyed at all by his presence; they’d suspected he might be waiting for them. Their plan was to tag-team him so they could take turns reading over his search history.
“So, does your family have plans for next Friday?” Jillian started her distraction run. Louise slid on her gaming goggles so Tristan couldn’t see what she was accessing. He’d started the night by hacking into the school’s computers and pulling up student records. No surprise there. But he’d also tapped the records of all the employees too. Odder yet, he’d done detailed background checks on a weird selection of them. Mr. Howe. Miss Hamilton. Those made sense. Miss Gray. Less sense. Teachers whose names she didn’t recognize. No sense at all.
“Next Friday?” Tristan seemed completely confused.
So was Louise. She went back and checked which student records he’d pulled. He had only looked at seniors and juniors. He’d ignored the fifth-graders completely.
“Next Friday is the Fourth of July!” Jillian said. “It’s why we’re having the play on Wednesday instead of Friday. Everyone who goes on vacation leaves early Thursday so the school made the last day on the second.”
Actually they were supposed to get out of school the second week of June. By law, the school had to hold classes for a hundred and eighty days. A broken water pipe in the fall, a blizzard in February, and then the bombing had pushed the last day into July.
