They’d rehearsed “the distraction” in their bedroom with a rolled-up towel cord standing in as “Wiggly.” They’d discovered they couldn’t contain Joy anywhere. Somehow she escaped from everything they put her into except Tesla’s storage compartment with a lot of snacks. With her loose, they couldn’t practice letting the real snake loose and catching it again. Somehow they’d overlooked the fact that the python might actively attempt to escape. The videos they’d watched on handling big constrictors all featured very slow-moving snakes.
She glanced questioning to Jillian, who shrugged and spread her hands.
“Louise.” Their father’s voice cracked. “Get the snake and put it in the box. Please! Now!”
“Okay,” she said to at least seem like she was obeying him. She dropped down to hands and knees to peer under desks and behind filing cabinets. So many places it could hide.
“Is it poisonous?” one of the men sitting on a desk asked.
“No, it’s a constrictor.” Jillian joined Louise on the floor. “They kill their prey by coiling around it and choking it to death.”
The man had been extending his foot down, and he paused, freezing in place. “Kill its prey?”
Where was the python hiding? There were many nooks and crannies, but most of them Jillian would have seen the snake moving across the floor to reach. The box canted sideways marked where Jillian dropped it. The desk that Laura Runkle was standing on, still screaming, was next to it. Just beyond the desk was a door marked “Masturbatory Chamber.” She had a weirdly strong feeling that the snake must have slipped unnoticed into the room beyond.
Her father let out a yelp as she opened the door and stepped into the room.
The snake was on the floor, as she expected, coiled in a pair of men’s pinstripe trousers. There was a businessman perched on a table, clutching a magazine to his front.
“No! No! Don’t come in!” the businessman cried.
And her father snatched Louise up and carried her out of the room.
“I need to get the snake.” She squirmed in his hold.
“I will get it,” he said firmly.
“But — but—” She didn’t want to say he was scared of it, but obviously he was.
“I will deal with it.” He caught Jillian by the shoulder as he walked past her and pulled her in his wake. He carried Louise all the way to the back of the warren of cubicles and sat her down in a chair. “Stay here.”
A minute later he returned, looking ashen but holding the box.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Louise said. “I didn’t know you — you didn’t like snakes.”
“I grew up in rattlesnake country. I know that they’re not the same, but fear is not always rational. I’m sorry. I know you want a pet, but Daddy just can’t deal with the idea of a snake in the house.”
Tesla kept faltering as they backtracked to the pet store, returned the snake, and made their way to the subway. She had forgotten to turn off the magic generator. She was afraid he was breaking down, but she didn’t want to call attention to it. If their father decided he could troubleshoot Tesla, he might find all her changes to Tesla’s programming and the nactka in his storage bin.
Luckily, just as they reached the stairs down to the subway, their father’s work called and he wasn’t able to push off their demands.
“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.”
26: A Date Which Will Live In Infamy
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.