Harbinger

8: HOPPING DOWN THE BUNNY TRAIL

“Let me get this straight,” Usagi Sensei, the head of the Bunny household, said. “You’re all spies?”

This was not a conversation that Lawrie Munroe wanted to have. She’d been actively avoiding it since the June Shutdown. She sat as pushed-back from the Bunnies’ long dining table as she could get, long legs kicked out to distance herself from the conversation. While Usagi was looking at her fellow Bunny, Widget, there was a stuffed rabbit under the table glaring accusingly at Law.

Law should have left after making sure that all the Bunnies were safe. She had taken, however, one too many lumps while trying to keep the oni from attacking Oktoberfest. She’d also left her Power Wagon parked at the train depot in Charleroi. There was a derailed train, a platoon of oni warriors, and an army of pissed-off elves between the Bunny enclave and the depot. At the time, it seemed wiser to hunker down, let Babs Bunny stitch up all her cuts, and make sure she didn’t have any hairline fractures. The last day — or two — had been incredibly hazy as she recovered with the help of antibiotics, painkillers, and lots of bedrest.

“What are spies?” Bare Snow asked over the rim of her chocolate milk. Three months of living with Law had made Bare Snow somewhat fluent in English but there were still lots of words that she didn’t know. The “teenage” elf female was wearing only an oversized nightshirt and one of the kids’ bunny hats, her long blue-black hair done in little-girl braids. It was utterly an adorable outfit, but Law knew from experience that Bare Snow also had half a dozen weapons hidden on her at all times. (It was a fact that often boggled Law considering how little Bare Snow wore.)

The Bunny household was having an emergency family meeting before their half-elf children woke up. All five Bunnies were in attendance: Usagi, Babs, Clover, Hazel, and Widget. (Clover, though, had her head down on the table and seemed to be asleep. She’d been up half the night with her colicky newborn son.)

Law wasn’t sure how she and Bare Snow had gotten roped into the meeting, as they weren’t officially part of the household.

The Bunny children all called Bare Snow “big sister.” After a lifetime of being an outcast in her own family, Bare Snow embraced the role with her whole being. The young elf wouldn’t want to miss a “family meeting.”

Usagi was in full mini-Martha-Stewart mode, complete with starched bandana. “A spy is someone who secretly collects information about an enemy.”

Yes, Law could totally be what someone could consider a spy. A freelance spy. Or an assassin. Or an avenging angel. Whatever. She had been one since the June Shutdown. She didn’t want the Bunnies to know, because there were all sorts of dangerous secrets attached to what she’d learned in the last three months. While Usagi and Widget had gotten a massive information download in June — the evils of the Skin Clan Empire and how Windwolf’s grandfather had been assassinated — they were missing key pieces of the story.

It wasn’t that Law didn’t trust Usagi. The problem was Usagi came with six sets of big ears and little mouths that endlessly repeated the most unlikely of things. (There were seven half-elf children but one couldn’t talk yet.)

Law had been hoping that Usagi would never ask about Law’s activities because she couldn’t lie to the woman — not in front of Bare Snow. Elves viewed lying as the worst sin that you could do. Bare Snow wouldn’t lie to save her soul. She would turn against Law if she heard Law lie, especially to someone like Usagi.

“No, we’re not spies!” Widget was the youngest Bunny, a cute teenage African American girl. She was stunningly intelligent yet lacked common sense. She’d actually swum the shark-infested Ohio River during winter, thinking that river sharks hibernated. “We’re Hal’s Heroes! We’re like the Sons of Liberty during the Revolutionary War, only less sexist.”

Law controlled a grimace. Widget’s other loyalties also made Law worried about telling the Bunnies the truth.

“Who exactly are these Hal’s Heroes?” Usagi asked. “How did you get involved with them?”

“It’s like Fight Club,” Widget said. “The first rule of being in the Resistance is not to talk about the Resistance. Besides, you know how hard it is to keep a secret in this house with all the little kids hearing everything and repeating it over and over and over?”

“In the name of the moon, I’ll punish you!” Bare Snow struck a Sailor Moon pose. Law wasn’t sure if Bare Snow was actually following the conversation. The discussion slipped in and out of the two languages on the fly. Her quip, though, illustrated Widget’s point, since it was one of the first things Bare Snow learned in English.

“The Resistance?” Babs was the oldest of the Bunnies. She had a skunk stripe of premature gray that she liked to dye various colors. Currently it was purple. Her lap was full of squirming ferrets, as part of her being the family doctor extended to the pets. Each ferret had a medical record in a binder that Babs was making notes in. “What exactly are you resisting?”

“We haven’t completely settled on a name,” Widget said. “Some people wanted us to be the Rebel Alliance but it was decided that’s too hokey. We’re using ‘the Resistance’ as in ‘the French Resistance.’ I think the name is to impress on people to be hush-hush and don’t go blabbing stuff to anyone, not even people they trust, because those people might tell other people who would tell the wrong person.”

“We need to know what you’re involved in,” Usagi said. “This time it saved all of our lives, but it could also endanger all of our lives. The elves believe that the head of household is responsible for all the actions of the individuals in their enclave. Who are these people? Why did you join them without talking to us first?”

Law squirmed but kept quiet; technically, she and Bare Snow weren’t part of Usagi’s household. Their activities shouldn’t bring the elves down on the Bunnies.

“Well, I didn’t seek them out and join them,” Widget said. “I was crushing on this boy that works at the bakery. I met him when I went in to help them with their computers. He is so fine, with the bluest of eyes.”

“Duff?” Usagi consulted with many of Pittsburgh-based companies, trading her Earth business savvy for things like dining tables. It was through her contacts that Widget ended up doing computer work for the bakery.

Duff was Alton Kryskill’s younger brother; number five in the Kryskill clan. The siblings were all ruggedly handsome as Norse gods. Their stunningly beautiful mother had a coffee shop downtown but their dad had been a sniper for the US Marines. The family’s sniper genetics meant all the siblings tended to keep to the shadows despite being incredibly good looking.

“Yeah, right?” Widget said. “Out of the blue, two months ago, Duff suddenly calls me and asks me to hack the city’s security camera system. ASAP. Matter of life and death. If I hadn’t done all the footwork while trying to find Windwolf the month before, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I’m not sure how he knew that I could.” She glanced pointedly at Hazel, who worked at the bakery.

“I didn’t tell him anything.” Hazel had a silicon sheet down on the table, flour up to her elbows, and was kneading bread dough. “Duff seems to think you walk on water when it comes to computers, he probably just assumed you could do it.”

“Me? Walk on water? Is that what Duff thinks?” Widget smiled dreamingly at the news. After a minute, she realized that they were staring at her. She shook off the distraction. “Well, I am damn good at what I do, but not that good. I used the backdoor that I made in June. Anyhoo, I didn’t know why he was so frantic and then boom, I’m looking at the pug-ugliest fishes walking around the city, trying eat the police. Duff is all code words and hush hush. We did it. Well…the guys in the Hummer did it but only with my help. We saved the policeman and killed the monsters. Duff was all ‘Thank you, I love you, thank you’ and ‘Don’t breathe a word to anyone about any of this.’ Like I would talk to anyone about hacking the City of Pittsburgh’s computer system! That was before Princess Tinker pulled the orbital gate out of the sky; Duff’s family was worried about repercussions.”

The Kryskills had produced an honest to God cannon, killed the giant walking electric catfish terrorizing the city, and then vanished without fanfare. There were a handful of people who knew it was them — the cop that they rescued for example — but no one offered up the family’s name to the media. Not even the EIA named them in their press releases. It’d taken days for Law to connect the dots and figure it out who had saved the city.

“Duff is part of this Resistance?” Usagi asked.

Widget cringed. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“You know we won’t tell anyone.” Usagi glanced to Law.

“I swear on my honor, I’ll tell no one.” Law was fairly sure no one would ever think to ask her. People saw her as an antisocial backwoods man-hater. (She didn’t hate men. It was simply a case that few seemed worthwhile and many needed a firm beating — administered by her — immediately.)

Bare Snow rarely talked to anyone outside of the Bunnies, so it was easy for her to nod in agreement.

“He’s my cell leader,” Widget whispered. “It’s all been hush-hush from the very start. We don’t really know who-all is working for the oni. We don’t know what level of technology that they’re operating at. We have to assume that anything we say might be overheard. I told Duff about the French guy — Mr. Fancypants — Brous-whatever.”

“Andre Brousseau?” Law named the first person whose death she was responsible for, although technically he shot himself.

“Yeah, him. I told Duff how Andre looked human and worked for the EIA but was kidnapping girls like me off of Earth for the oni. I couldn’t tell Duff what Andre’s name was or I’d have to explain about everything that happened in June. It turns out that the tengu had told Duff that ‘the people that look human’ were oni greater bloods. When Tinker domi returned Jin Wong to the tengu, Jin ordered them to quietly wipe out the greater bloods. The problem is that ‘the oni’ never trusted the tengu completely. Jin’s people only knew a few greater bloods. The tengu knew that there were more. I’m not sure if anyone knows about the Skin Clan angle — but I couldn’t explain it without telling them about Bare Snow.”

Widget had been hopping around certain information landmines from the very beginning.

“You’ve kept the right hand from knowing what the left hand was doing?” Law said.

“If the tengu knew about Bare Snow, I think they would feel honor bound to tell Tinker domi,” Widget whispered. “I know that Bare Snow was set up to be a scapegoat for the attack on Windwolf. I don’t know if the sekasha would believe that she had nothing to do with it. I don’t think they would hurt her, but what do I know? I thought river sharks hibernated. I couldn’t risk it.”

Law hugged Widget. “Good girl.”

“I’m the only one without a baby,” Widget whispered. “I felt like I was the only one able to fight to make sure they all stay safe.”

“You could have told us,” Usagi said. “Quietly. When the kids were sleeping. We can keep secrets.”

Widget cringed. “I was afraid that if I started to talk I wouldn’t stop. I needed to keep it all compartmentalized or I was going to start babbling it all out to the wrong people. And it seemed unfair to put that kind of pressure on you. You literally can’t tell anyone about Duff and the Resistance. You wouldn’t believe how stupid some humans are! There are people that are saying we should just step back and let the elves lose! Pull the police and the EIA off the streets and let the oni take control of the city! These idiots would be perfectly okay if the oni killed every single elf in the city ‘because the humans would still be alive to make deals.’ They don’t realize that the greater bloods have always treated the true bloods and lesser bloods as disposable tools. It’s why even the half-oni have turned against them. Once the oni wipe out the elves, there’s no reason that they’ll leave the humans unharmed. Or at least, most Pittsburghers used to be stupid. Maybe after what happened at Oktoberfest, they’ll start to realize that the oni will kill everyone — empty the city — if that’s what it takes.”

That was a chilling bomb to drop but probably completely correct.

“I think Oktoberfest was a wake-up call,” Usagi said. “It was for me. We’ve been cautious but I think we haven’t been careful enough. A lot of people know that the Bunnies exist. That we have half-elf children. If the oni are bent on genocide, then we have to assume that they’ll come after our babies.”

“Yes, they will,” Bare Snow said. “They’ll see the children as dangerous mutts and will want to eliminate them before they can breed.”

“But they’re just little kids!” Widget shouted.

All the mothers hushed her. The meeting would have to end once the children woke up.

Widget whispered fiercely. “They’re not dangerous. They’re little and they’re going to stay little for years and years.”

Bare Snow leaned across the table to take Widget’s hands. “I know that a hundred years would seem forever for you. It is all of my life plus few more turns around the sun. To the Skin Clan, it would be a blink of an eye. They are an ancient evil, easily ten thousand years old. They might not come for the children this week or this month or even this year, but they will come. They will want to wipe clean anything that could be immortal and remember what they’ve done here.”

“What are we going to do?” Hazel whispered.

“Make sure they don’t win!” Widget said loudly.

“Those of us without babies should focus on that,” Law said, meaning her and Bare Snow.

Clover stirred for the first time. She opened her exhausted eyes and reached out to take Law’s hand. She proved that she hadn’t been asleep the whole time by saying, “Thank you, Law. Bare Snow. Widget.”

Clover had a toddler and a newborn who would be orphaned if she was killed fighting. Their fathers didn’t know that the children existed, if Clover even knew which male impregnated her. Clover lived up to the “sex drive of a rabbit” myth.

“We’ll do what we can without drawing the line of fire on everyone.” Babs most likely would be a backline medic once fighting broke out. Her son was only a few months younger than Moon Rabbit.

“We need to double-up on our hoarding.” Hazel started to shift her bread dough into the kitchen to rise. “What we got during the keva-bean handout won’t last long.”

“We can gather food for you!” Bare Snow turned hopeful eyes to Law. “We can, can’t we?”

“We’ll make sure you have fresh fish and such.” Law couldn’t promise more as it was already September. In the last two months, more and more people were out foraging the old abandoned fruit trees, and hunting small game like turkeys, squirrels, and rabbits. It was pushing the bigger game animals deeper into the forest, making them harder to find.

“I think we should move.” Usagi shifted into planning mode now that information gathering was over. “I only picked this restaurant so we had access to a kitchen that we could get FDA-approved. That’s useless until Tinker links Pittsburgh back to Earth — assuming she stops getting hurt.”

“She can do that?” Widget asked.

“She can only juggle so many grenades but yes, probably she can from what I’ve heard,” Usagi said, making Law wonder where Usagi was getting her information. Law had heard that Tinker domi had been out at Squirrel Hill tunnels, looking them over, but there had been no confirmation that Tinker could actually link them to Earth. “We should find someplace farther from the front line. Someplace smaller that’s easier to heat and easier to defend. We should get some weapons. We should learn how to use them.”

“We can teach you!” Bare Snow said.

Hazel came back for another round of bread dough. “We need to come up with protocols on how we’re going to deal with emergencies so we all know what the plan is. I had no idea what to do when fighting broke out at Station Square. If Widget hadn’t been able to tell me that everyone was safe, I would have gone there.”

There was a sudden stampede of little feet in the room over their heads.

“Oh, the children are awake,” Hazel said.

The kids were good and didn’t scream or shout as they came thundering down the stairs, but the damage was done. Clover’s baby woke up crying.

“Once more into the breach, my friends.” Clover stood up.

Counting Clover’s infant, the commune had seven children. The six who could walk swarmed the table. The Bunnies were all shades of hair color, skin tones, and sizes. Their children, though, all looked like full siblings with straight black hair, blue almond-shaped eyes, and pointed ears. Moon Rabbit, the oldest, led the charge. She was fourteen but looked and acted six, which was why she only occasionally seemed able to dress herself. This morning she only had on her Wonder Woman underwear and was dragging her rabbit onesie behind her. Her right pigtail braid had unraveled, so her black hair hung to her waist. The other children were equally in various stages of dress. Her little brother, Shield of a Thousand Leaves, still looked like a toddler at five years old. He was crying because he had tried to put on a pair of costume butterfly wings and gotten them stuck on his head. Blade climbed into Bare Snow’s lap since his mother, Clover, had headed upstairs to deal with her colicky baby. Thunder went to lean against his mother, Babs, but her lap was still full of ferrets. All the kids were talking and crying and screaming.

Law loved the children and enjoyed the chaos in small doses, but she had hit her limit. She was already standing up when her phone rang. The screen showed that it was Alton Kryskill.

“I need to take this.” She used the call as an excuse to flee the house completely. The sidewalk outside the house was strewn with toys. She had to pick her way carefully to a clear spot. “Hi, Alton! How did it go?”

She’d asked Alton to check her fish traps and deliver anything he found in them. Luckily she had only promised “water produce” to Caraway’s enclave as she had expected Oktoberfest to chew up more of her time.

“I found your traps without any problem,” Alton reported. “They were full. I got everything to Caraway’s and Chili Pepper was happy.”

“Great!”

“Are you free? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Law frowned at her phone. What would Alton want to talk about? It boggled her mind. About how she found out about the train? She had left dead bodies behind her. How she derailed the train alone? She doubted Hazel or Widget would have mentioned Bare Snow to Duff.

“Now?” Law said when she realized that she’d been silent too long.

“Yeah, if you’re free. I’m on Mount Washington at the moment.”

Which was an alarming coincidence.

“What are you doing there?” Law glanced around.

“My little brother Marc has a place on Grandview, the old Greely place.”

Law turned to look toward the distant WESA radio tower. She had only been to the house once during an epic high school party that went south when one of the football players didn’t listen to the warning “she’s drunk, leave her alone.” He did listen to the autographed hockey stick to the side of the head, though. There was a reason she wasn’t offered the place when the Greely family moved Stateside last year. “Okay, meet me at the Duquesne Incline.”

Looking at Alton Kryskill, it was easy to see why Widget was crushing on his little brother Duff. The Kryskills all had piercing blue eyes, beautiful honey gold hair that poets would write sonnets for, and a build that made them seem godlike. Alton added a neatly trimmed beard, slightly darker in hue than his golden locks, that accented his strong chin.

The “Asian woman” who accompanied Alton had all the little tells of a tengu warrior: lean, muscular body, strong nose, ink-black hair. The female identified herself as Yumiko Sessai. A few months ago the name “Sessai” wouldn’t have meant shit to Law. After a summer of covertly fighting the Skin Clan, Law knew it indicated that the woman was one of the near-mythical yamabushi, who were said to have magical powers. All her intel said that they were stalwart protectors of Jin Wong and the other members of the Chosen bloodline. The Kryskills had gotten very deep into the tengu camp somehow if Alton was running with a yamabushi.

Alton didn’t want to talk about it — which was fine with Law, since she had her own secrets to keep.

Yumiko was willing to believe that Law was badass enough to take on an entire train full of oni warriors single-handedly and yet knew no more than the average Pittsburgher about oni history. It would seem naïve of Yumiko, except for the fact that the Kryskill family had pulled a cannon out of thin air and taken on six giant walking catfish. Yumiko might consider “foragers” on par with Paul Bunyan and Daniel Boone. It was also possible that Yumiko expected Alton to later educate his family.

Whatever the reason, Yumiko patiently covered oni history as it pertained to current events.

At one point, three worlds — Elfhome, Earth, and the oni homeworld of Onihida — had natural gateways connecting them at countless points. It was through these gates the first “greater bloods” appeared on Onihida. The invaders had a strange new magic unknown to the inhabitants: powerful bioengineering spells that allowed them to create horrific war monsters. They quickly conquered Onihida.

What the tengu only recently realized was that these “greater bloods” were actually Skin Clan elves who had already conquered Elfhome in the same manner. Originally their entire race had rounded ears like humans, but the Skin Clan gifted their slaves with pointed ears, so that slaves could be identified instantly. It meant that the ancient members of the master race could pass as humans, and had been doing so in Pittsburgh since the first Startup.

This matched up with what Law had discovered on her own at the beginning of summer. She and Bare Snow had covertly fought and killed several EIA employees who looked human but were actually Skin Clan elves.

Yumiko connected many dots that Law was missing. The Skin Clan had set their sights on the powers held by the godlike dragons that were from a fourth world. Neither the tengu nor the elves were sure how many dragons the Skin Clan had managed to trap. They did have a list of known victims: Clarity, Brilliance, Honor, Impatience, Joy, Nirvana, and Providence.

According to Providence, the dragons had decided that the captured individuals had trespassed on the elves’ homeworld and thus were responsible for their own sad fate. Because they thought waging a war with the Skin Clan would be unjust, the dragons simply put Elfhome and Earth under interdict. They attempted to protect Onihida by destroying the gates that linked it to the other worlds, not realizing that the elves had already pushed their way onto that planet.

The Skin Clan started out small in their experiments, using the genetic material from the slain dragons. They wanted various magical abilities like seeing the future, teleporting between worlds, and phasing through walls. They made the mistake of using their slaves as test subjects, accidentally gifting some of them with godlike abilities. The following rebellion was both ironic and inevitable. After that, the Skin Clan discovered a new application for the captured dragons: powerful spell bombs.

“With just one of these bombs, they could turn all the elves in the Westernlands into monsters,” Yumiko explained. “We believe that the reach of the spell is limited to the wavelength of magic or one mei. When our people were transformed from humans into tengu, it took all of us, even the ones in hiding, far, far away. Our only advantage is that if the oni wanted the spell to transform all the elves in the West Coast Wind Clan holdings and the southern-most Stone Clan ones, they would need to stay near Pittsburgh. Otherwise they could cast the spell anywhere in the Westernlands.”

“Just the elves? Not the humans and tengu too?” Law asked.

“The transformation spells — we think — need to be keyed to one genetic pattern. When we were transformed into tengu, there were oni guards surrounding us that weren’t affected by the spell.”

Yumiko showed Law a photo on her phone of a large, elaborately decorated egg. It looked like something made if Fabergé had been on acid. “The Skin Clan on Onihida only had access to Providence’s body. Their people hidden among the elves manipulated Forest Moss into finding the sole remaining pathway between Earth and Onihida. In the brief time between its discovery and the elves destroying it, those moles created eleven of these genetic bombs. We believe Kajo has them but we don’t know where Kajo is hiding. Shortly before Jin Wong returned to us, Kajo killed all the tengu under his direct control and moved his camp. Tinker domi believes that he’s using dream crows to stay one step in front of the elves. She says that she could only outwit Chloe’s ability by doing things that Chloe couldn’t understand, even if she saw what it was that Tinker domi was doing. We need to be unexpected to get ahead of Kajo.”

“And I’m unexpected,” Law said.

“You stopped the train,” Yumiko said.

“Okay.” That was not a comforting logic because Law knew how she sketchy her entire plan had been. “How do I pick out this Kajo from thousands of other oni? What does he look like?”

“We’re not sure,” Yumiko admitted reluctantly.

Everytime Pittsburgh traveled to Elfhome, a tiny uninhabited island in the middle of the China Sea traveled to Onihida. The Skin Clan were freed from their prison but needed to get across several of Earth’s international borders to reach Pennsylvania. They also needed legal identification, visas, and the ability to pass as human on a planet that had no magic.

The original inhabitants of Onihida, known as “true bloods,” could jump through all the legal hoops and security checks to make the trip. They were, though, now a small minority on their home world. The immortal Skin Clan had been experimenting on the native population for thousands of years. The bulk of the oni were “lesser bloods” that often had animal genetics mixed into their bloodlines. No amount of paperwork could get them across international borders.

It meant that the Skin Clan could smuggle very few of their warriors into Pittsburgh. They needed a standing army to take on the elves and humans. What they could get in large numbers were poor Chinese women and a wide range of Elfhome animals. These they could interbreed to create a fast-growing warrior stock. Most of the “half-oni” that Law knew, like Trixie Chang, were children of true bloods and humans. The ones hidden away were fathered by lesser bloods. Those ranged from humanlike beings to things so monstrous that they couldn’t be called sentient.

The problem was that some of the lesser bloods would only obey orders from beings that appeared as fierce as themselves. To appear more menacing, the true bloods painted their faces and the greater bloods wore ferocious-looking masks.

Yumiko said that Kajo would be fairly easy to spot among the oni — he was short, slight of build, and wore a distinctive crimson demon mask with horns. She provided a drawing of the mask as the tengu never managed to get a photo of it.

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” Law promised. “But I’m not going to wade into that mess out east of Monroeville, not after what happened at Station Square. Cana Lily tried to kill me.”

Windwolf had protected her but she couldn’t count on his protection for Bare Snow.

“We’re not asking for you to join that fray. It would be very like Kajo to allocate the fighting to an underling. Lord Tomtom would have led their forces on the battlefield if domi had not killed him. Kajo would have not trusted the spell bombs to Lord Tomtom or his replacement. The lesser bloods are cannon fodder, no more, to Kajo.”

Law nodded her understanding even as she wondered if the tengu were giving her too much credit. She had been able to stop the oni before by sheer luck of being onetime lovers with Trixie Chang and having a grandfather who worked on the railroad. The two aspects combined to allow her to apply insider knowledge of how the trains worked to an offhand remark about what Tommy Chang had discovered about the oni movements.

This time she had two photographs, one of an egg and the other of a mask. What was she supposed to do with these?