Jillian tugged at her hair in frustration. “A boy is — someone who is not a girl.”
“What is a girl?”
“We’re girls.” Louise tried to head off that route of questioning.
“Well, then, we must be a boy, because we’re not you.”
“That works,” Jillian and Louise agreed.
Nikola was distracted from the camera by the snow globe of the hyperphase gate in orbit over Earth. (The Elfhome one was the first thing Jillian had put up out of reach.) He gave a little “oh” of amazement when the glitter swirled. Louise struggled not to snatch the globe out of his paws. She really didn’t like it that much; it still felt vaguely dangerous to her for some reason. She supposed it could be worse; there could be four babies fumbling through the twins’ belongings, in mass confusion.
“What are we going to do?” Louise whispered to Jillian. “Mom and Dad are going to freak if they find out. And they will, if he keeps talking.”
“We’ll tell them we figured out how to upload a personality, and we chose Christopher Robin. Nikola, can you say, ‘Silly old bear’?”
He tilted his head with confusion. “Silly old bear?” He had a perfect Christopher Robin lilt, but the intonation was wrong.
“No, no. Silly old bear.” Jillian gave the correct tone of an older person addressing a child.
“What’s a bear and why is it silly?”
“We are so screwed,” Louise whispered.
“We can work with this,” Jillian said.
“But what about tonight? We can’t leave him alone!” She was imagining all sorts of awful things like him getting out of the house and getting stolen.
“We can’t take him to the gala.”
“What’s a gala?” Nikola asked.
They stared at him with slight horror.
“It’s a party to raise money for some charity.” Louise attempted to define it in words that he might understand. “People get dressed up fancy, and there’s music, and pretty decorations, and. .” Actually, she wasn’t completely clear what the gala was going to be like, so she fell back on the parties of Jane Austen. “People dance and say snarky things to each other, and there’s food and—”
“Food?” Joy woke up and joined the building disaster.
“Oh, now you’ve done it.” Jillian sighed.
“I’m hungry!” Joy cried.
“You’re always hungry, you bottomless pit.” Jillian opened the lowest drawer, where they’d hidden all of Joy’s food. “Oooh, you’ve eaten everything!”
“So hungry!” Joy clambered into Louise’s arms and gazed up at her pleadingly. “Open can!” She made the sound of the can opener. “Yummy, yummy, stinky food in can!”
Louise wished she knew how much Joy was supposed to eat. Was she actually starving like she seemed or was she just pigging out? She didn’t seem to be getting any fatter. After she’d eaten her fill, she would sleep for hours. “We should feed her before Mom and Dad get home.”
They moved to the kitchen since Joy was a messy eater. Jillian spread out paper towels for Joy to stand on as Louise used the can opener to open up the organic cat food that they had bought for the baby dragon and hidden under the sink. Joy sat on her haunches and clapped her hands together. Nikola watched with interest.
“Gimme!” Joy cried the moment that the can was open, releasing its pungent smell. She grabbed fistfuls of dark moist meat and shoved it into her mouth as quickly as she could shovel it in.
“Do you think we should move her to baby food?” Jillian asked.
Louise shrugged. They’d started with little three-ounce cans with pull-top lids that Joy mastered after they opened the first can in front of her. During the night she raided the kitchen and left the empty cans all over the floor. Luckily, Louise woke up and found the mess first. They’d moved to the twelve-ounce cans, which meant the little dragon was eating nearly a quarter of her weight in one sitting. “She likes these.”
“Nom, nom, nom,” Joy mumbled around the mouthful.
“Why is she putting it in her mouth?” Nikola asked.
How did he know it was her mouth and not know about food? It made Louise’s head hurt.
“It’s yummy.” Joy held out a handful to him. “But stinky.”
“No!” The twins both cried and leapt to intercept Nikola’s attempt to eat the food.
“That’s dragon food,” Louise said.
Nikola eyed the half-empty can. “It says ‘cat food,’ not dragon.”
He can read the word food but not understand it? Louise glanced at the clock. They had exactly one hour before this became a complete disaster.
“Nikola, do you understand danger?”
He tilted his head to the right and then to the left. “Danger is when the primary target is in an area that might harm the primary target.”
That sounded like robotic logic. Louise supposed that if Nikola could move the dog’s body and talk over its speakers, then the full robotic brain could also be accessed.
“Until we tell you otherwise, only talk to Jillian and me.”
“Joy!” the baby dragon cried, waving her hand to be included. The hand held food that dribbled through her clawed fingers.
“And Joy.” Louise supposed Nikola might be able to teach Joy more English. So far she seemed only interested in learning words that got her more food. “If you really need to say something to us, and there’s someone else there, you need to say ‘Tut, tut, it looks like rain.’”
“Tut, tut, it looks like rain,” Nikola quoted solemnly.
“Yes.”
“But there’s only a thirty percent chance of rain,” Nikola complained.
“We’re so grounded.” Jillian sighed.
They washed out the empty cat-food can so it wouldn’t smell, buried it deep within the trash, ran the range exhaust fan, and sprayed the kitchen with air freshener. Joy needed to be washed carefully, and she squirmed like an earthworm as they tried soaping her up and spraying her down in the kitchen sink.
“Just hold still!” Jillian cried.
Joy stuck out her tongue at Jillian.
After they were all dried off, they went back upstairs to get dressed for the gala and plan for their parents’ arrival. Nikola followed them up, murmuring Christopher Robin lines that they’d taught him and complaining.
“Tut, tut, it looks like rain. It still doesn’t make sense. Silly old bear. But what bear? You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. That one at least makes sense.”
Louise stared at the mirror, trying to gain the confidence to actually leave the house. She felt like everyone was going to be looking at them, knowing the impossible and illegal things that the girls had been doing the last few days. Stealing magical artifacts from a museum. Baby dragons. Robotic dogs possessed by unborn siblings. She wanted the comfort of knowing that she and Jillian were drawing attention because they were cute and not because people knew. Jillian looked cute, and they were twins. It stood to reason that Louise must be just as cute. All she needed to do was believe.
“We should just leave him here,” Jillian said as Louise tied a big yellow bow onto Nikola.
“No! We have to take him.” Louise’s whole insides went queasy at the idea of leaving their little brother behind. “It’s part of having a baby; you can’t leave them alone just because it’s inconvenient. Something might happen to him.”
“We were going to put him in the time capsule in the back of the closet.”
In truth, they had only given a little thought about where they were going to store the nactka once it was loaded. It seemed unlikely that Nikola would be safe in the back of the closet for years and years. The plan had seemed so solid until it hit that “and then what” gray zone. Tesla wasn’t really a good compromise. They needed to do more, but until then, they needed to take care of Nikola like he was a real baby.