The American Museum of Natural History had its own entrance from the 81st Street Subway Station. There were beautiful tile mosaics of a coral reef with sharks and fish. The twins stood, pretending to study the art while everyone who arrived with them swept out of the station.
They backtracked to a blind corner and quickly assembled their gear. The spell needed to be printed onto a three-dimensional surface that stayed rigid while the magic was active. After a lot of experimenting, they’d found that wardrobe moving boxes worked best. The forty-eight-inch-tall cardboard boxes covered them head to toe and were sturdy enough for the spell to work while they moved around.
Louise was all fumble-fingered as she carefully taped up her box. It had to be fitted together completely square. Then, seeming impossibly slow, she peeled the protective sheet off the circuit tracings and stuck them to the box. Everything had to match perfectly or the spell wouldn’t work.
When she was done, she glanced to see if Jillian had finished her box.
Jillian was gone.
“Where are you?” Louise called.
Jillian’s muffled voice came from near the tile mosaic. “Over here.”
“I can’t see you,” Louise said without thinking.
“Doh!” Jillian’s voice grew nearer. “Hurry up. We only have a few minutes before they shut the doors!”
“Okay, I’m almost ready.” She lifted up the box and let it slide down over her. In the darkness, she activated the magic generator. She gave it a minute and then spoke the words that triggered the spell. “Did it work?”
Jillian huffed nearby. “Wait a minute, I’ll check.” There was a muffled scuffling noise. “Well, I can’t see you, so I guess it worked. Let’s go.”
The drawback to the spell was that they couldn’t cut eyeholes in the boxes. Nor could they mount cameras to the top of the boxes. They were basically running blind. Keeping the subway wall to their right, they started forward. Or at least Louise assumed they were both walking forward. She couldn’t hear anything but her banging heart, nervous breathing and the soft scuff of her shoes. The scent of cardboard seemed nearly suffocating; why hadn’t she noticed it before?
She went as carefully as possible down the subway hallway, toward the museum. They’d marked the edge of the museum’s surveillance with a piece of tape. Once she crossed it, she turned on her phone and used the back door they’d created in the museum’s surveillance system to watch the flow of people coming and going. They’d discovered if they moved sideways quickly, there was a slight blur in the video. It let them track their own movements with a small risk of discovery counterbalanced by the ability to dodge other people. She wove around a woman with a stroller and a group of Japanese tourists.
Her heart jumped as they passed the threshold into the museum proper. They were almost safe. There were people coming and going from the bathrooms on the right, so she kept to the left. At the end of the hallway, she turned left and went back toward the lunchrooms for school groups on field trips. The doors were shut and locked, but it gave a safe spot to crouch, out of the way, until the museum actually closed. There was a time stamp in the corner of the surveillance video. 5:32:03. They had cut it close.
At 5:35, the second closing announcement was broadcast, echoing through the nearly empty museum. After the English request for visitors to leave the museum, it repeated in Spanish and then Japanese.
Guards went into the bathrooms around the corner, their voices echoing on the tile. “We’re closing. Anyone in here?” They heard the thud of bathroom stall doors being swung open to make sure no one was standing on the toilets.
At 5:45, the recording of “The American Museum of Natural History is now closed” played in three languages as the big metal shutter rattled shut, closing off the subway station.
They’d done it. They were inside the museum after closing! They were now officially cat burglars.
“Meow,” Louise whispered.
The hardest part was going to be waiting another ten minutes before moving to be sure they avoided any last-minute sweeps of guards. There were still cleaning crews and guards and employees working late to dodge, but they should be few and far between.
Louise opened another window and checked on Tesla via a traffic camera. They had bought him the climbing feet attachments and had him scale the forty-foot granite pedestal to hide at the feet of the Chinese astronaut Jin Wong. The bronze statue of the man had odd wing-things spread wide behind him. Even after close study, and an extensive Internet search, Louise and Jillian weren’t sure what they represented. Its location across the street from the museum, its height, and the wings made it a perfect place to hide Tesla. Even on the high traffic camera, the robot dog was invisible.
Reassured that Tesla was still safe, Louise closed the window and waited.
At 5:54:30 something collided with her. She yipped in surprise.
Jillian whispered a curse word. “It’s just me.”
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.