“Are you?” Louise asked Iggy. She had gotten the impression that his parents were very protective of him. Certainly it explained why he’d be worried that someone else’s parents would refuse.
“I’m fairly sure my dad will sign it. Hook is da man!” Iggy waved his left hand with his fingers still in braces.
“How much longer before your fingers heal?”
Iggy eyed his left hand. “We see my doctor next Saturday. The doctor said four weeks, maybe five, so I might get it off Saturday.” He seemed doubtful. “Knowing my mom, though, even if the doctor says they’re healed, she’ll want me to wear it another week or two, just to be sure.”
Which meant it had been more than four weeks since they’d found out about their siblings. It didn’t seem possible that much time had already gone by. They had less than two months now to find the mythical box with mysterious
They got their jackets. Iggy’s locker was four down from theirs. As Louise activated Tesla, Iggy drifted back to pet the toy’s head.
“Good boy, Tesla, keep them safe.” Iggy waved his broken hand and headed back toward the stairs. “See you next week.”
“’Bye!” Jillian called brightly. Louise forced herself to wave; that’s what friends did, wasn’t it?
Apparently the Chen family was still being paranoid after Iggy’s brush with violence; his sisters were waiting for him at the staircase so the family could go home together. His oldest sister was hunched as if carrying a great weight, head bowed, long bangs covering her face. As Iggy joined them, she looked up, and for one brief moment, she was as beautiful as Iggy claimed. Then she ducked her head as if withdrawing into a shell, vanishing from sight.
“Who were you just now?” Louise asked Jillian.
“What?”
“When you said good-bye, who were you? Peter Pan?”
“Oh, no, not Peter. He wouldn’t think to say good-bye. He isn’t much on hello, either. I kind of like that about him.”
Tesla tilted his head and said, “Squirrel,” in his little-boy Welsh voice. Both of them jumped with surprise.
“What the hell?” Jillian laughed. “I forgot he could talk! Why did he say that?”
Louise squeaked with surprise. “Oh, I completely forgot!”
“Squirrel,” Tesla said again.
“Alarm off!” Louise pulled out her tablet. “I linked him to the box search so he could wake us up if the result came in during the night.” A squeal of excitement leaked out as a flashing icon on her screen confirmed a positive hit. “We found it! Dufae’s box! We found it!”
They rode home, heads together over her tablet as Tesla stood guard. Luckily their subway car was blissfully empty. Louise’s spider had found a dozen photographs taken of Dufae’s chest. It matched her CGI sketch perfectly. The pictures were dated from last year. The text explained that the chest had been discovered in the basement of the Louvre. It was labeled “unidentified block of unknown wood with possible Elvish runes,” with a side note that said it had been donated to the museum in 1897.
On that site there was nothing else about the chest, but there were hundreds of other photographs of objects found around the world at various museum and private collections. The common denominator was that they were all suspected of being from Elfhome prior to the first Startup.
“We were right that it must have been common for the elves to travel to Earth,” Louise said.
“But it doesn’t explain why they stopped,” Jillian said impatiently. She pulled out her tablet and started to follow trails of data. “Okay, where is the box now?”
“All these objects are part of a crowd-sourcing project. Oh! The irony!”
“What?”
“All these objects are linked to Dr. Forthwright,” Louise said.
“
“No, the woman we based him on.” They’d changed the woman’s name to hide the fact that they’d raided her personal computer three years ago. Because they often played Forthwright opposite to Prince Yardstick and Director Maynard of the EIA, it felt weirdly sexist to keep the one non-ninja scientist female since they had made the character both extremely nearsighted and often clueless. It was like they were saying somehow that women shouldn’t be intelligent. They’d changed the sex as well as the name of the anthropologist. “Dr. Cassie Banks.”
“Okay, that’s a weird coincidence.”
“Dr. Banks has a sister that works at the Smithsonian. While doing inventory on objects in storage, her sister found a vase labeled ‘Jefferson’s Chinese Vase’ with what appeared to be Elvish runes. She sent photos of the vase to Dr. Banks, who recognized the mark. It’s a stamp that elves use to identify the clan and household who made the item.”
“Jefferson’s Chinese Vase?” Jillian said.
“Maybe they thought the Elvish Runes looked like Chinese characters.”
“They don’t look anything like Chinese!”
“The vase was last cataloged in 1912. They didn’t have the Internet and translation software.”
“It’s the Smithsonian!”
