Up on the Rooftop Read Online Free PDF Page A

the side of the health club. She only gave a cursory glance around her to make certain no one was watching—these people were so sour that they probably wouldn’t accept real magic if they saw it.
    Then she crouched, and sprang upward, using all those magical muscles she had gotten when she got this assignment. She floated up to the roof. The sleigh shimmered ever so slightly, its outline only visible up close, and then only as a cutout against the sky.
    She stepped inside, and winced at the stench of peppermint. Delbert was standing at the counter in the back, making a chocolate peppermint banana smoothie. She didn’t even have to check her watch. The appearance of the smoothie meant it was now officially afternoon.
    “Took you long enough,” he said.
    She ignored that. He said it every single time she came back in the sleigh. Sometimes the statement was accurate, and sometimes it wasn’t. This time, it probably was.
    She went over the array of cobbled together computer and magical equipment near the guidance system, and took her seat.
    “We need to find someone,” she said.
    Delbert swallowed the smoothie in one long gulp, then wiped the brownish stain off his face. “Not our job,” he said—or rather, mumbled. His mouth was still full of smoothie.
    She hated the equipment. It looked like three 1950s television sets combined with a steam engine, rope, and a calliope. It had been designed by Santa hundreds of years ago, and modified every century or so. It hadn’t gotten this century’s modification because the fairies who designed the system were at war, and Santa didn’t want to get involved.
    The fairies were, so far as she knew, one of the few groups that could easily combine technology and magic. Santa had relied on them for his entire career. Until now.
    She put her hands on the screen. She didn’t have the magic to do a Santa-time search, where all she had to do was think of the person and end up with the name, address, personal history and current Naughty/Nice ranking. Instead, she had to use the screen as a window into the camera mounted on the sleigh’s runners.
    “I want this thing airborne,” she said.
    “Good,” Delbert said. “We going back to work?”
    “We’re ahead of schedule,” she reminded him.
    “We still have 35 houses to go,” he said.
    “And five days allotted. We can do 35 houses in a morning.”
    “What happened out there?” he asked.
    “Just get this thing in the air,” she said.
    He didn’t argue. She was nominally in charge, even if he was an S-Elf. He was an S-Elf on double-secret forever probation, and he would probably never be in charge of anything ever again.
    So he moved across the small cockpit to his little chair. Santa’s sleigh had gorgeous benches and seats that molded to your frame. The back-up sleighs were utilitarian because they needed room for food storage, sleeping compartments (uncomfortable and dangerous sleeping compartments, which was why the advance team had a hotel budget), clothing, and other supplies.
    Delbert’s hands moved over what looked, to Julka, like a smooth countertop, and the sleigh shuddered. There were only two reasons an S-Elf had to be on a sleigh. The first was to test—as realistically as possible—Santa’s entry into the various houses, and the second was to fly the sleighs. Only S-Elves had the encoding (some of the more scientific types said DNA, but others believed it was just a magical quirk) to get the sleighs in the air.
    The sleigh wobbled and tumbled, and then righted itself. Delbert had had too much peppermint and was flying impaired. But Julka wasn’t going to report him—at least not yet. Because if she did, then they might send a replacement, and she wouldn’t be able to get away with…what? She wasn’t sure what she was trying to get away with.
    She just knew it was something.
    She peered in the glass screen, which bubbled outward just a bit, distorting the images of rooftops, roads, and snow, snow,