Up on the Rooftop by Kristine Grayson Page A

don’t know. Are you asking money or personnel?”
    “Both, I guess,” he said, suddenly unable to visualize paying for everything he knew about the fictional Santa.
    “I’m not privy to the money side,” she said, “but it’s huge. And we have millions of employees worldwide, not all of them human.”
    Not all of them human . He tried not to let his brain turn to mush at that statement. “You mean reindeer, and stuff.”
    “Elves,” she said. “They’re not human. Delbert’s not human.”
    “He’s an elf?” Marshall asked.
    “He’s an S-Elf,” Julka said. “From Santa’s line. Those are the most important elves of all.”
    “Wow,” Marshall said, believing it, then wondering if he should believe it, and then wondering if the sleigh (this was a sleigh, right?) made him believe it, and then wondering if he should believe that the sleigh made him believe.
    So he gave up wondering at all.
    “But you’re human,” he said, and it was more of a hope than a question.
    She nodded. “A lot of families got hired real early on to humanize the whole procedure and most of them stayed. My family goes back twenty-five generations at the North Pole.”
    He did the arithmetic in his head: Twenty-five generations, at roughly twenty years per generation, was—
    “Five hundred years?” he blurted.
    “Give or take,” she said.
    “So you grew up at the North Pole?” he asked. “I thought it’s desolate there.”
    “It’s not the North Pole that you can travel to,” she said. “It’s like this sleigh. We have a different North Pole that you can access—or rather, I can access—through your North Pole.”
    His North Pole. He’d never seen the North Pole. Either one, actually.
    “And you now work as what—Santa’s advance team?” he asked.
    “Kinda,” she said. “I’m probably going to get fired for this.”
    “For bringing me here,” he said.
    She nodded miserably.
    “What happens when you get fired?” he asked.
    She shrugged a shoulder. “I’ll probably have to go back to training school, and they’ll find me a job at the Pole. I really, really, really wanted to spend my time in the Greater World.”
    “Which is—?”
    “Your world,” she said. “I wanted to man one of the advance headquarters, you know, have a permanent place here.”
    “And you risked all that to talk to me?” he asked. “Why?”
    “I don’t know.” She raised her head. “You just seemed important somehow.”
    “Important to…?”
    “Me,” she said miserably. “Important to me.”
    No one had thought him important for years. Not since his parents died. And then, he wasn’t their main priority. They were each other’s main priority. He was second on their list and had been from the beginning. He had known that almost as soon as he started breathing.
    “Why would I be important to you?” he asked. “We just met.”
    “I know,” she said. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?”
    He took her hands. She was trembling.
    “No,” he said. “No. It’s not stupid.”
    He wanted to say it was an honor, but that actually sounded like he was dismissing it. And if he said You’re important to me too, it would sound like he was just trying to make her feel better, and he wasn’t.
    “I’m standing here,” he said, “and you’re making me rethink everything I’ve ever known, and honestly, I’m not fleeing, which is what I usually do when I’m challenged. I turn away. And I don’t want to.”
    Her gaze met his. Her eyes were big and blue and incredibly beautiful. “Why?”
    “Because,” he whispered, “I found another place where the math doesn’t work.”
    “What—?” she asked.
    “Soul mates,” he said. “It’s mathematically ridiculous.”
    She nodded, and tried to pull her hands from his.
    “But I’ve never felt anything like this before,” he said. “So right, so perfect, as if we were made for each other.”
    Her eyes filled with tears, but they didn’t fall. He leaned forward and