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It wasn’t difficult to act natural. He couldn’t move.
The words slid into his head like slivers of cold pain. Tears fell from drying eyes. In a brief moment of clarity, he recognized the pressure coming from behind his ear, the familiar buzz.
Thought transfer.
It was a device the size of a flattened gumdrop. Once pressed against the scalp, it would perform a brain scan. The elven used it to stabilize brain abnormalities or stimulate auditory functionality for the hearing impaired. It was calibrated for elven minds, not human. If it was applied to Claus’s scalp—typically just behind the ear—it would hit him like a hammer.
Right now, his head was ringing.
Only a few elven had ever used the technology for thought transfer, though. And they had used it all their lives. They hadn’t said a word since the day they were born.
All three of them.
The helpers followed the miser out of the warehouse and were now returning to the sleigh. They circled one of the gift walls that lay flat on the ground. Together, the redbeards and yellowbeards and blackbeards grabbed the edges and lifted. The serious helpers dressed in black were there, too.
Claus didn’t look at them.
They had been standing behind him when the gift opened. The walls had knocked him over and they helped him up. He hadn’t noticed their hands against his head, or the thought transfer device placed behind his ear.
That was when his head began to ache.
They joined the others in lifting the massive wall. Slowly, they moved it away from the sleigh, inching along like a big-footed centipede. Dropping one edge on the floor, the helpers tipped it forward. It slammed against the mountain and triggered a landslide of miniature legs.
The helpers sang a merry song as the spiders dissected the wall like ants taking apart a discarded candy cane. The serious helpers returned with the others to move the second wall, eyes cast down, mouths set in grim lines.
There were three of them.
Pain lanced behind Claus’s eyes as information pried its way into his head. An audible surprise escaped him. He pretended to hiccup.
Follow the map, he heard.
A grid appeared to overlay his vision. Elements were labelled and paths laid out. A lighted line led toward the back corner of the warehouse.
When the helpers began hauling off the third wall, he stood up. His knees were weak. He leaned on the fallen chair and blinked the world into focus. The map projected over his normal eyesight. Claus wandered off, shoulders slumped and head hung low—he assumed that sadness and despair would be his normal attitude—and watched a dot move on the map.
The helpers’ song soon faded behind him.
***
SNOW WAS FALLING AGAIN, piling onto flat surfaces. It dampened the warehouse activity, wrapping him in a cocoon of frigid solitude. A dusty cloud of spies mingled with the snow, whooshing past his ears like phantoms.
By the time he reached the destination, he was beginning to doubt the voice in his head. The headache had receded. There was nothing but crates in this part of the warehouse. They were stacked so high they disappeared in fog. At the bottom of this massive pile, a crate was missing.
An opening stood darkly.
There were no tracks leading around it. Claus dropped on his hands and knees. It wasn’t just a missing crate. The one behind it was gone too, and the one after that. The stack above it was so high that it seemed impossible for this much of a gap to be an accident or even remain without collapsing.
The map directed him to crawl inside.
He hesitated. If this was an unintentional gap, he could be buried beneath the weight. No one would find him. The map glowed brighter and the dot began blinking.
Claus crawled inside and lay on his back.
Whether he imagined the map or not, he was exhausted. The spies could report his nap. It wasn’t out of the ordinary. He frequently woke up in various parts of the warehouse. The miser wouldn’t be surprised to see him sulking.
She’d expect it.
Despite the adrenaline, he soon drifted into a shallow sleep that was cold and cramped. Perhaps the thought transfer was stimulating a serotonin release to keep him relaxed while he waited. Visions began spilling into his thoughts. He had a thousand questions.
They answered them.
The triplets had found a long, red hair at the site of his disappearance. DNA analysis led them to an abandoned house, where they confiscated a computer and identified a rare but harmless radioactive isotope, the same isotope found at an abandoned research and development site of Avocado, Inc.
Scanning the planet, they located several sources of the radioactivity, but none as hot as the one emanating from an island in the South Atlantic. The confiscated computer identified the spit of land. It was the last search Heather Miser had done before disappearing.
The triplets arrived on the southern shore a day ago.
They used a back-reflecting net to move through the island unseen. Ronin waited for them to return. They picked up Claus’s body-heat signature in the warehouse. They cut their way inside and built a tunnel beneath the crates. The weight of the cargo was supported by a thin matrix of fibers that looked like spiderwebs. It took nearly half a day for the triplets to build it, having to do it in regular time. Their timesnapper would have been detected.
As luck would have it, Naren had altered the look of the helpers.
The triplets fit right in.
***
“WINTER WONDERLAND.”
The helpers were singing. Claus rubbed the dull ache in his eyes and peered between the crates to see them sliding toward him. Redbeards and longhairs, bigfoots and square-jaws... the jolly parade was in full swing.
Led by the triplets.
They danced and sang, swinging each other around and cheering in unison, as if madness did not exist inside the warehouse and the miser was sane.
Christmas was coming.
Claus watched from his darkened isolation. They didn’t seem to notice him or the spies hovering outside his fort. A snowball exploded on the crates. It was followed by another. Soon, a fight was in full swing.
The triplets started it.
Song degraded into laughter as the helpers bombed each other with perfectly sculpted snowballs. There were no teams—no blackbeards versus shortfoots, no pointy-ears against slimbellies. It was an all-out snowball war.
Just like elven.
From the melee, a dark figure slid into the crate tunnel and collided with Claus. He was followed by another and then a third. The triplets reached their hands around his belly and together they hugged. Claus’s eyes steamed up and a soft lump rose in his throat. He held his jolly joy silently.
I never thought I’d see you, he thought.
Outside, the spies dodged the ruckus and occasionally hovered outside the cave. Claus noticed a strange ripple across the opening, as if the air was wrinkled. The triplets had thrown a camo net over the entrance that would project an image of Claus sitting in his isolation as he had been doing since he arrived. The spies wouldn’t see the triplets hugging him.
Or see them escape.
Pain stretched across his forehead. Images flooded his vision. The tunnel beneath the crates was a maze that went all the way to the warehouse wall. A panel had been cut away. Once they were out, they would reach the southern shore before dawn.
Ronin was waiting.
Snowballs continued to pop and laughter roared. Silently, the triplets began their escape. Claus followed. When they reached the first turn, the helpers began singing. Their voices faded as they journeyed back to the mountain.
Peace settled outside the crates.
This wasn’t what the triplets expected. The snowball fight was intended to provide cover. Claus took a deep breath as he edged around the tight turn. A nail snagged the white trim on his sleeve. It was quiet outside. He looked back one more time before continuing on his hands and knees. Something was missing.
The spies weren’t watching.
Claus rubbed his eyes and squinted. The triplets were tracking his vision. They saw what he saw.
The triplets scrambled toward him, but the tunnel was cramped. If their cover was blown, there were dispersal units loaded for release—a cloud of nanobots that would project the triplets running in different directions. It would buy them enough time to get to the exit. The island would go on high alert and the way to the southern shore would be difficult. Maybe impossible.
Christmas would never happen.
Claus ducked low enough for the triplets to take aim. The nanobots would spill out like a blizzard of sleet. The triplets stacked behind him, alert and tense, watching a shadow call over the snow. Their bodies tensed. A man squatted at the entrance. They paused as he held up a hand.
He wore a shiny glove.
“We need to talk.”
***
THE TRIPLETS REMAINED still and silent. Claus was holding his breath. Slowly, they crept back toward the opening and peered through the camo net. In the middle of the clearing where the snowball fight had occurred, a redbeard was down. He lay with his hands under his cheek like that was the perfect place to nap.
Naren had taken a knee next to him.
Claus moved closer and waited behind the camo net. The triplets’ protests throbbed in his head. They urged him to follow, pleading with him to go now. There wasn’t time to stay back. But Claus stayed.
He listened.
“I didn’t design the ones in black,” Naren said, “so I’ll assume they’re here for you. The moon will set in a few hours. I don’t know how you’ll get off the island. It’s a long ways to the mainland. There’s a boat on the north end, but getting to it will be difficult.”
He was right about the moon, but they had something much better than a boat. Naren administered a syringe and stared at his watch. The redbeard stirred. After a few minutes, he pried open the eyes.
The spies were not hovering over him. They appeared to be all alone.
“I don’t know who you are,” Naren said, as if he was talking to the fallen redbeard. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. But I need your help.”
The redbeard sat up and shook his head. Snow flew off like a wet dog stepping out of a frozen lake. He hopped on his giant feet. Naren sat back and watched him skate a few rings before sliding off to find the pack.
Naren slowly put away his equipment. He got up like a doctor on call. The triplets’ urgent warnings pulsed in Claus’s head. Naren stared at the camo net.
“She needs our help.”