Wood Sprites полностью

Louise checked her phone. The screen showed the hallway clear. It should be safe to talk, and they needed to keep from running into each other. “You take right. I’ll keep left.”

Jillian’s feet appeared on the screen as her twin lifted up the box to hear better. “What?”

“Stay on the right side of the hallway.” Louise repeated and moved to the left side of the wide hallway. “I’ll go left.”

“Okay.” Jillian’s feet vanished as she dropped down the box.

They needed to get to the third floor from the basement without colliding with anyone. The fastest way would be the elevators, but guards would see and hear the cars moving. They were hoping that the escalators wouldn’t be turned off immediately. They’d found going up stairs in the boxes cumbersome.

The good news was that if they moved slowly, there wasn’t even a blur of motion on the monitors.

The bad news was that if they moved slowly, it was easy to lose track of where they were and run into walls. The hallway did a weird dogleg and they found themselves in a dead end, bouncing off each other.

Jillian was stuttering in frustration. “Ompfh! No! Ah! Don’t.”

“Shh!” Louise hissed.

“Stand still!” Jillian whispered.

So Louise stood still as Jillian moved forward quickly to establish her location on the screen and bounced off another wall with another muffled swear word. Louise used her twin’s voice and the blur on her phone to orient herself. She was facing the exact opposite direction they needed to go. Jillian turned and headed the right way in a quick shuffle. Louise turned around and cautiously followed.

Luckily the escalators were still on. It felt odd riding up inside the box, not able to see where they were going, knowing that they couldn’t be seen.

At the top, she bumped into Jillian again.

“Go right!” Louise whispered.

“Are you sure?”

Louise flipped to the online map. They should be right off the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall on the first floor. They needed to walk around to the next set of up escalators. “Yes.”

Second floor. Akeley Hall of African Mammals. Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda.

Third floor. Reptiles and Amphibians.

Her phone’s screen showed the exhibit area empty of people, but the lights were still on. The glass display cases were full of taxidermied reptiles. A Komodo dragon gleamed in the perpetual dimness. She had been worried that the museum staff would start turning off lights, but now she was starting to wonder why they hadn’t. It was now after 6:00.

The Lost Treasures of Elfhome exhibit was in the hall beyond the reptiles. When the twins had checked earlier, there had been a barrier up, directing the visitors back through the upper level of the African Mammal hall. While they’d been on the train, the barrier had been taken down.

Dufae’s box sat against the west wall, screened on all sides by the taller displays. According to e-mails, the case would receive a glass lid after the elves visited the exhibit. The lighting had been aimed so it gleamed off the gold inlay of the spell-lock glyphs.

Louise had won the flip of the coin earlier. She shimmied the box up and off. She checked her phone’s screen. It was still showing the empty exhibit hall. Wetting her mouth, she spoke the keyword to unlock the spell.

The band of glyphs gleamed and a seam appeared in the wood with a quiet thunk. The lid slid up and off easier than she’d imagined for not having been opened for hundreds of years.

Inside were a dozen spheres nestled in velvet-lined holes. They were much bigger than chicken eggs, but had the same oval shape. A spell had been etched into the surface of the nactka. When she picked one up, it seemed oddly warm and heavier than she expected. It wasn’t made of gold as she had first thought; the material felt more like ivory under her fingers, feeding her impression that it had once been the bone of some magical creature, cut into an egg shape and hollowed out. She shivered and carefully placed it into the snow globe box from the gift shop.

Jillian’s voice came out of nothing on the other side of Dufae’s chest. “Incoming!”

Louise quickly put the lid back on the chest and spoke the locking word. The glyphs gleamed and with another quiet thunk the seam vanished. Back toward the reptiles, the elevator dinged quietly.

“Go,” Louise whispered as certainty filled her. “If we’re both here running blind, we’ll get caught. Take the backup route. Go! I’ll catch up.”

Jillian gave a muffled curse, but she went because she always got caught when she didn’t listen to Louise.

Louise tucked the boxed nactka into her backpack, felt around to find her invisibility box, and lifted it up and shimmied it down over her. There were footsteps coming quickly in her direction.

She was almost to the door out of the exhibition area, into the primates, when the elevator in front of her also dinged and its doors opened. She bit down on a squeak and skittered sideways until she hit a wall and backed into a blind corner.