Harbinger

10: ARE YOU MY MOTHER?

A certain irrefutable logic led Tinker to Lain’s house. The only way that the twins could have unlocked Dufae’s box was with the proper key word. The only way they could have learned it was if they had a copy of the Dufae Codex. Tinker could have asked the twins where they got it, but they scared her.

Her grandfather had given highly edited digital copies to Tinker and Oilcan, but he couldn’t have known about the twins. He would have fought for legal custody of them if he’d known that they existed.

Esme saw bits and pieces of the future. She had created Tinker to protect Pittsburgh. She could have foreseen the twins’ existence but she had left Earth shortly after Tinker’s birth, eighteen years ago. She wouldn’t have been able to interact with the twins directly. She could have, though, placed a copy of the Codex where they would be sure to find it.

Tinker wanted to see Esme’s face when she explained how Esme’s little experiment with frozen treats had unintended side effects. Tinker was still a little miffed that Lain had lied about their relationship for eighteen years just because Esme asked Lain to. It was some nonsense about evil empires or something.

It reminded Tinker to ask Lain about her mother’s involvement in all this. Tinker’s grandmother. The one she never even knew that she had. The one she would probably never get to meet. Grandmothers were supposed to be like fairy godmothers of love; at least everyone she knew acted like it. She’d never actually met a real grandmother in the flesh. Blue Sky didn’t have one. Nathan’s grandmother lived in Florida. Roach had never introduced Tinker to his grandparents.

Forge’s appearance made Tinker hyperaware that grandparents were a mixed bag of gifts. It still pissed her off, though, that Lain hadn’t trusted her to be smart enough to keep her mouth shut. Tinker could keep secrets if she understood the reasons. Even now she wasn’t sure why Lain felt constrained to keep it a secret. What did it matter if people knew?

Tinker mulled over the question all the way to Lain’s place. Jin had said that the twins’ parents had been killed and they ended up in the custody of Lain’s mother. How did that happen? Did it have something to do with the reason that Lain had kept Tinker hidden?

Tinker stomped up the front steps and rang the ancient hand-cranked doorbell. Lain usually dead-bolted her front door; she didn’t trust her neighbors. Tinker expected Lain to answer the door.

Esme calling “I’ll get it!” was the only warning Tinker got before the door was opened by her mother. Esme kept surprising Tinker by popping up in odd places — like in her dreams or the city morgue. Part of the surprise was the fact that she looked nothing like what Tinker imagined her mother to look like: tall, thin, and white-blond hair with a purple dye job. Today she had added mysterious streaks of red, pink, blue, and green on her cheeks like war paint. Esme was in her early thirties but something about the way she moved suggested that she was only a few years older than Tinker’s eighteen. It made her seem more like an older sister who would compete with Tinker for Lain’s affection. It did not help that Esme wore a set of khaki shirt and pants that Tinker recognized as Lain’s favorite outfit.

“Scarecrow!” Esme smiled brightly, although not looking surprised that it was Tinker at the door. “And your guard dogs.”

“Don’t call them that,” Tinker said. “And don’t call me Scarecrow.”

“Okay, Princess!” Esme grinned widely.

“Don’t call me that either!” Tinker brushed past Esme. She could smell sugar cookies; it might explain the war paint on Esme’s face. Was getting frosting on your face a genetic trait? “Where is Lain?”

“Come. Sit. Talk,” Lain called from the kitchen. “We have news.”

“News?” Tinker headed for the kitchen.

“Alexander?” Esme called after Tinker, still searching for an acceptable name.

“Tinker!” Tinker shouted back.

“Tinker domi,” Stormsong said as she drifted in Tinker’s wake. The sekasha hadn’t totally forgiven Esme for invading Tinker’s dreams; it had nearly driven Tinker mad.

The rest of Tinker’s Hand was quietly moving through the house, upstairs and down, checking for monsters. They would make themselves scarce after being sure that the house was safe. Stormsong was the only sekasha fluent in English; she would report to the others what was covered in the conversation.

Lain’s house was a big Victorian mansion on Observatory Hill that served as her home and her workspace. It had been built in the late 1800s when the neighborhood was all homes of wealthy and influential families. A small forest had been used to decorate it with wood paneling, wainscoting, and carved molding, all stained to a rich cherry hue. A sage green damask wallpaper with woodland animals hidden within its elaborate design covered the few walls that weren’t paneled. It had always been a warm and welcoming place of refuge for Tinker while she grew up.

Lain sat at the kitchen table with a plate of sugar cookies decorated with frosting. Tinker’s favorite. Was it because the sisters had foreseen her arrival? There were two cups of tea for the sisters and a tall glass of cold milk for Tinker. Yes, they had.

Tinker thumped down into the chair in front of the glass of milk.

Lain refused to decorate her cookies; she made her guests go through the extra effort. Esme must have been the one who used the Mickey Mouse cutter to shape the cookies. Esme had painted the mice ears red, green, pink and blue.

“Have you been dreaming of mice?” Tinker asked. Oilcan had told her of his odd dream about the Dufae babies visiting him as mice wearing different colored scarfs. The colors matched up to the ones that Esme used.

“You too?” Esme answered with a question. “My dreams have gotten really weird since I’ve hit Pittsburgh.”

“That’s a yes, then?” Lain asked.

“Oh, God, yes,” Esme said. “Lots of mice. I’m not sure if the mice are literal or figurative. I don’t think we’re going to be besieged by talking mice — but odder things have happened lately. I do think something satisfyingly horrible happened to Yves, but I’m not sure. It seemed very real. Maybe it’s going to happen.”

“Who the hell is Yves?” Tinker asked.

“Our older stepbrother,” Lain said. “Yves Desmarais.”

“Satisfyingly horrible” was not a phrase you usually used when talking about family members.

“What exactly is so horrible about our family?” Tinker said. “Why couldn’t you tell me, Lain, that you were my aunt?”

“Maybe we should start with our news,” Lain said. “It is profoundly disturbing but it should give you a good idea what our family is like.”

“Okay,” Tinker said cautiously. The summer had served up so much disturbing information that Lain’s statement kind of scared her.

Esme sat down directly opposite of Tinker. “A few nights ago, when we were at the morgue, I met that reporter, Chloe Polanski.”

“She’s dead.” Tinker didn’t add, “I killed her.” She wasn’t happy about the blood on her hands.

“Yes, her picture is on the front page of the newspaper.” Lain believed that televised news was more of a popularity contest than real information. She only periodically watched WQED, mostly for Hal Roger’s gardening show. She did get the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette daily and read it front to back.

“At the morgue, I thought I had met Chloe before,” Esme continued. “She seemed very familiar. It wasn’t until her picture was in the paper that it hit me why.”

Lain took an old-fashioned photograph out of her breast pocket and pushed it across the table to Tinker.

For a moment, Tinker thought it was a picture of Chloe. It was more than that the woman had the same pale blue eyes and white-blond hair. She also wore the same bobbed haircut, flawless makeup, and chunky amber necklace. It was as if someone had tried to cosplayer the reporter. The picture appeared to be taken in New York; the Statue of Liberty stood far in the background. The vehicles in the foreground had the sharp-angled styling of the ’70s or ’80s.

Chloe was in her late thirties; she wouldn’t have even been born at the time of the picture.

“Who is this?” Tinker asked.

“That’s our mother,” Esme said. “Anna Shanske Desmarais.”

“What the hell?” Tinker said. “Why would Chloe be cosplaying as your mom?”

“It’s a lot more than that.” Lain fished a necklace out of her pants pocket and put it on the table beside the photo. “Chloe was wearing our mother’s jewelry. Our father, Neil Shanske, had this made for her. See their wedding date was etched on the back of the pendant?”

“Mother loved amber.” Esme tapped the necklace. “She never wore this particular piece after she remarried. Our stepfather showered her with amber jewelry that she would wear instead. She tried to keep this hidden from me. When we were little, I used to tear the mansion apart until I found it. I would march up to her, thrust it at her like a knife, and tell her to put it on. She never would. Shortly after I left for college, she called and asked if I took the necklace with me. She couldn’t find it.”

“She called me during Shutdown to ask about it,” Lain said. “She was sure one of us had taken it but I hated the damn thing.”

“I don’t get it,” Tinker said. “How did Chloe get the necklace and why was she trying to look like your mother?”

“I pulled some strings,” Lain said. “Maynard was surprisingly cooperative when I used your name. I got a DNA sample from Chloe’s body. Based on her mitochondria, Chloe was our sister.”

“She was what?” Tinker said.

“Our sister,” Esme repeated. “The three of us have the same mother.”

Tinker frowned at the piece of jewelry. “Chloe was younger than Lain — but — not that much younger. She would have been born before Lain came to Pittsburgh.”

Lain nodded. “Yes, that’s right. And if she had this necklace, then she had to know who our mother was.”

Stormsong breathed out a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Tinker asked, since her Hand normally did everything in their power to stay silent and invisible during a discussion.

“Chloe came dressed in black to the morgue,” Stormsong said. “She had planned on taking the bodies of the Stone Clan children so no one could learn the truth about why the oni had kidnapped them. The moment you told Esme that you were her daughter, Chloe nearly tripped over herself trying to flee.”

Tinker had noticed that Chloe seemed very unsettled by the news. It had puzzled her. “What’s so important about Esme being my mother?”

Stormsong shifted closer to the table. “If Chloe knew that Esme was a strong intanyai seyosa, she would have had to believe that you were too. Such abilities are passed by the mother’s bloodline. It would instantly explain how you’ve managed to do so many impossible things. What’s more, Chloe’s blood tie to you through Esme’s mother would mean it would have been easy for her nuenae to overlap with yours.”

“My what?” Tinker knew that Stormsong had used the term before but she wasn’t totally sure she understood the word.

“Nuenae.” Stormsong repeated and then paused, thinking. “I don’t know the English word for it — if there is one. It is basically the world that you are trying to grow. Intanyai seyosa literally means ‘someone who sows or farms the future.’ When your nuenae overlaps with another intanyai seyosa, you share visions of things that might affect your shared future. It’s why you and your mother were both having Wizard of Oz dreams. It was also why the tengu dream crow, Gracie Wong, was part of those visions — she was trapped on the damaged spaceship with your mother. She would share any future that Esme created. The more you interact with someone related to you, the more the nuenae transpose. Chloe had already interacted with you once. At the morgue, when she learned that you shared her bloodline, she realized any prolonged interactions with you would make it probable that you would dream of what she had planned.”

Chloe Polanski had been Tinker’s aunt and she had killed her. That totally sucked. It was also totally weird: Chloe knew that she was Esme’s sister but Esme hadn’t?

“How did you not know about her?” Tinker asked the sisters. “Why wouldn’t your mother tell you that you had a younger sister? Or is it some weird compulsion that the women of our family have — to have secret babies that we scatter about the landscape like breadcrumbs?”

“We don’t think our mother knows about Chloe,” Lain said.

“But — but — but — Chloe knew who she was!” Tinker thumped the table beside the jewelry. “If she had this necklace, then she’d been to your mother’s house. Right?”

Esme gave a bitter laugh. “Not necessarily. Yves or one of the boys could have taken it.”

“Boys?” Tinker asked.

Esme and Lain exchanged looks.

“You really told her zilch about the family?” Esme said.

Lain shook her head. “I was afraid that if anything happened to me, she would feel the need to share the news with the boys. They would have wondered why I kept a child close to me, and the ball would start rolling.”

Esme sighed. “Our father — as you might know — was Neil Shanske. He was an astronaut. Our mother is Anna; she was from a family of well-to-do bankers. When I was six, our mother met an evil snake of a man called Edmund Desmarais. Within a few weeks, our father was dead. Desmarais had him killed.”

“There’s no proof of that,” Lain said quietly.

“Our stepfather is evil.” Esme glared at Lain defiantly. “He killed our father.”

Lain scoffed. “Your daughter has made me completely impervious to that look. I won’t argue that he’s evil, but we’ve never been able to prove he was behind the shooting.”

“The man is a billionaire,” Esme said. “He had enough money to make all proof disappear.”

Lain didn’t argue the point. Instead she turned to Tinker and asked, “Do you know how our father died?”

“He was killed in a random shooting.” Tinker knew that small part of Lain’s family history. Their family history. “He was doing a charity appearance in a bad neighborhood — in California? Someone opened fire on the crowd.”

“Esme was six and I was twelve,” Lain said. “Our father was training at the Marshall Space Flight Center, which is in Huntsville, Alabama. Our mother was an investment banker; she had relocated to Huntsville so we could be together as a family. That’s how she met Desmarais. He had an isolated estate outside of Huntsville — a huge plantation house that had been in his family for generations. Our father was on a business trip to the Jet Propulsion Lab when he was killed.”

“On Earth.” Esme stood up to pace the kitchen. “Without magic, you never get that gut punch of ‘this will be bad’ and your dreams seem like they’re just nightmares. But I know what I know: Edmund Desmarais killed our father.”

“And I’ve always believed you,” Lain said. “But to everyone else, you were just a child having nightmares after her father was murdered.”

“Desmarais turned our life into hell to make our mother marry him. Oh, we could never prove it,” Esme said as Lain lifted her hand to protest. “But we knew. He had our mother mugged. The robbers took her wallet, emptied her bank account, and maxed out her credit cards. Our house was burned down. Our car was stolen. It just went on and on. Anyone that she might have turned to was lured away with a job offer on the other side of the country, or had some crisis of their own spring up, or was simply killed.”

“He loved her that bad?” Tinker wondered if it could even be called “love” if it moved a man to be so cruel.

Lain and Esme exchanged looks and shook their heads.

“We don’t know why he wanted to marry her,” Lain said. “We never did, but it wasn’t because he loved her. It couldn’t have been for her banking savvy; he could have had that without marrying her. She was already handling his money.”

“It was his money, not hers,” Stormsong said. “Nuenae extends from yourself. You must always be at the center. It does not include the wealth of other people. If you try to focus on others that way, it becomes like trying to walk two paths at once. Only the most powerful intanyai seyosa can keep track of multiple goals. My mother is part of the queen’s personal household merely so their nuenae would align.”

Lain shook her head. “He couldn’t have known that. They’re both humans living on Earth without magic. This was long before Pittsburgh traveled to Elfhome — at least, in human terms. I was twelve when they married; I was in my thirties when I came to Elfhome that first Startup.” She frowned slightly. “But — you know — Yves was there that first day. He didn’t seem as puzzled as everyone else by the ironwood forest.”

“Yves never looked a day older the entire time we knew him,” Esme whispered.

“Desmarais never seemed to age…” Lain paused. “Oh, God, it makes sense now. Desmarais is an elf trapped on Earth, just like the Dufaes. How did I not see that?”

“An elf would have recognized an intanyai seyosa,” Stormsong said. “They would have known that they had to tie the oracle to them for their abilities to work.”

Tinker gaze fell on the necklace. “But where does Chloe fit into this?”

“I have a theory,” Lain said slowly, gaze distant as if she looked at far-off objects. “Desmarais tried to win our affection.”

Esme made a rude noise. “Buy us off. I wasn’t having it. I knew what he did.”

Lain motioned to Esme not to derail the subject. “If he is an elf, then he’s been on Earth for centuries. He married mother to bind her to his nuenae but that was a short-term fix for him. If he wanted her abilities over the centuries, then he would need to control her bloodline.”

“Operation: Baby Machine,” Esme snarled.

“What?” Tinker said.

“Desmarais talked our mother into quitting her job to devote herself to having children,” Lain said.

“Mother loves babies,” Esme said. “It wasn’t that hard to do.”

“Yes, there is that,” Lain said. “The problem was that she was forty when they married and he had a really low sperm count, so they had to go through in vitro fertilization. It was such a big production that they couldn’t keep it from us. We knew everything. How many times it failed. How many times she miscarried. It took them two years for Lucien and she spent all nine months in bed. But Desmarais wanted more — she wanted more — so the medical circus continued. If a doctor said it was too risky, they would find another doctor. It always made me wonder: If she was the golden goose, why was he risking her? If he was an elf, though, he knew that she would die long before he did.”

“She almost died giving birth to Tristan,” Esme said. “She was forty-six. Some women are grandmothers at forty-six.”

Tinker struggled to control the hurt welling up. “You have two younger half brothers that you never told me about? Lucien and Tristan?”

Lain sighed. “Yes, ladybug, Lucien and Tristan are our younger half brothers. Desmarais had a son by his first wife. Yves was ten years older than — well — if Desmarais was an elf there’s no telling how old Yves is. Oh! Oh! If Desmarais was an elf, it means Lucien and Tristan are half elves.”

“Oh crap!” Esme said. “That bastard! Autosomal dominant genetic disorder, my ass!”

“What?” Tinker said.

“Oh, I feel so stupid!” Lain was shaking her head. “Desmarais made out that the boys had some odd disease that made them look like children even when they were full grown. How could I not see that they were half-elf?”

Esme reached out to cover Lain’s hand. “All that happened before the first Startup; we didn’t know anything about elves and their immortality!”

Lain waved away the excuse. “Even afterward, I never questioned it. It’s so obvious now; the boys were like Blue Sky. When they were eighteen, they only looked like they were six or seven. They were still babies, but Desmarais treated them like they were grown men. He sent them away so they wouldn’t distract Mother from her work.”

“I never laid eyes on them again,” Esme murmured. “Have you?”

Lain shook her head.

Oilcan’s kids ranged from seventy to ninety years old but were still obviously “children.” Even Windwolf was considered a “teenager” at 214. The Desmarais boys would be in their forties, which meant they were closer to tweens in age than teenagers.

Tinker had been thirteen when her grandfather died. She couldn’t imagine being cut off from everyone she loved after losing him. “Did you abandon them because of me?”

“Oh, no, ladybug,” Lain said. “We drifted apart long before you came into the picture. I–I don’t know why. We were close when the boys were little but afterward things started to change.”

“They’re the ones that started it,” Esme said. “Refusing to return phone calls or emails. I drove halfway across the country once to see Tristan before I left Earth. I wanted to say goodbye to him properly. He locked himself in the bathroom and cried until I left. I couldn’t even get within spitting distance of Lucien; I’m not sure he was even living at the address that Mother gave me.”

Tinker shook her head. “I’m still not seeing how Chloe fits into this.”

“Our mother and Desmarais were trying to have another child when the boys were both diagnosed with a genetic disorder,” Lain said. “The plan was to use a surrogate to carry the baby to term instead of Mother. They’d already collected and fertilized the egg. Desmarais had paid a woman to act as the surrogate. Everything was set to go when Mother found out why the boys weren’t thriving. She assumed all her children with Desmarais would be afflicted with the same genetic disorder. He seemed to agree. Chloe was the right age, though, to be a result of that experiment. We think that Desmarais implanted the egg into a surrogate and never told our mother.”

“That’s…that’s horrible!” Tinker said.

“Desmarais is a monster. He’s why I’ve never told you that I was your aunt. Why I never told you about our family. He sees people — his own children — as tools to be used. He’ll kill to obtain what he wants. There’s no way I could protect you from him if the wrong person found out the truth.”

Jin had said that the twins had ended up in the custody of Esme’s mother after their parents had been killed. Had Desmarais arranged another murder? Was that where the four other babies came from? Did Desmarais search out the frozen embryos after stumbling across the twins and had them implanted into a surrogate mother?

“How many frozen embryos did you leave in New York?” Tinker said.

“Me?” Esme said. “We’re talking about Desmarais.”

“More than six?” Tinker pointed at the mouse cookies. “Because there are six of your children at Haven. The tengu found them wandering out in the woods while I was out playing hide-and-seek with Chloe.”

Esme stood up, hands over her mouth, eyes full of horror.

“Esme?” Lain said.

Esme muffled cries of dismay.

“Esme, what did you do?” Lain said.

Esme whimpered. “There was only supposed to be one! There was only supposed to be you! The one old enough to be able to save Pittsburgh. I’ve been dreaming of them. They’re so little. So helpless. Just little mice of children.”

“Six?” Lain had backtracked through the conversation to lock onto the most important detail. “Six?”

“Six,” Tinker said. “Two nine-year-olds and four newborns — or something like that.” She must have been very mentally off-balance not to get clarification on that. Was there one woman or four women pregnant with Dufae babies? Had Jin Wong been as rattled as she or was there a reason he didn’t clarify? The summer had been so full of weirdness that it boggled her as to why Jin might have dodged the question. It was a fairly innocuous question — wasn’t it? It might be something simple like two pregnant women carrying one to three babies each and thus it was just easier to skip to the punch line and say four babies. It was unsettling, though, that Jin hadn’t given a fully accurate body count.

“My mother claimed that seeing across universes was nearly impossible,” Stormsong said. “She likened each world to resting in a separate ocean with only tiny streams connecting them. To know how events were unfolding in a world, one must be in that ocean. Not even she could foresee these children until they traveled here.”

“But she’s aware of them now?” Lain asked.

“Most likely. The intanyai seyosa caste has their differences. Battles between them are like poker games where the cards are people. When I saw your little sister at the museum, I felt the resonance of another dreamer who shared my nuenae. If she was strong enough for me to sense her on Earth, my mother knows that she’s here in Pittsburgh.”

Her little sisters just got more terrifying. They had precognition on top of everything else? Tinker could remember being that age — she was always so sure that she was right about everything. If Tinker had been aware of her limited precognitive abilities, she would have been worse. Much worse.

Chloe had been after Oilcan’s kids because they had special powers. Tinker’s little sisters had power in spades. The only real advantage the twins had was that the oni didn’t know that they existed. Or did they? Chloe was working for the oni.

“The twins reached Haven while I was playing hide-and-seek with Chloe. It means they got to Elfhome while Chloe was alive. Do you think that Chloe knew about the twins?”

Stormsong shook her head. “Chloe could dodge my sword but she was not at my mother’s level. If she was, she would have known you were Esme’s daughter long before that conversation at the morgue.”

That was comforting. Tinker turned back to Esme. “Did you store more than six embryos?”

Esme shook her head. “I–I-I don’t think so. The doctors retrieved a little more than a dozen eggs. One or two failed to be fertilized. We implanted three into your surrogate mother, just to be sure at least one took. I had dreams about twins, so I thought two of them would take. I’m fairly sure that they told me there were six embryos left over and all were of high enough quality to freeze. I left them in case the ones implanted in your surrogate mother failed to produce a genius.”

Tinker shivered. Six babies all like her sitting in cold storage for years, quietly forgotten.

Well — not completely forgotten — or they wouldn’t be up to their ears in Dufae babies.

“I think the twins have a copy of the Dufae Codex,” Tinker said. “How would they have gotten it? Did Grandpa give you a digital copy? Was it a complete copy or doctored, like the one I have?”

“He didn’t give me anything,” Esme said. “Tooloo gave me a memory stick with some old photos of the Dufae family, a family tree, and a large text file. I barely looked at it; I didn’t have time. I think I put some pictures in with the stick; I got blazing drunk that night. I gave it to your surrogate mother to pass on — I think. That last part is fairly hazy.”

“Tooloo?” Tinker said. “How the hell did Tooloo get old Dufae family pictures?”

Esme shrugged. “I got the impression that she had always been your family’s nanny. At least, that’s what she made it sound like. She said something about taking a baby from France to Boston back during the French Revolution.”

“What?” Tinker shouted. “Are you sure?”

“This was only a few months ago for me,” Esme reminded Tinker.

“How — how — how?” Tinker sputtered with too many questions to pick just one. Tooloo always called Tinker and Oilcan “her” wood sprites. Was it because the old crazy half-elf had something more to do with their existence than being an occasional babysitter?

“I’ve always had dreams that came true,” Esme said. “On Earth, without magic, they were like getting one peek into a box. One quick flash of what was to come and then the image is gone. The summer I came to visit Lain here on Elfhome, I suddenly could take the lid off the box and stare at everything inside. But what was inside were horrible, terrible things. I didn’t know how to stop it from happening — what I needed to do to make things right. I didn’t even know if I could change the future. There’s this old technique that some famous scientist used: right before he went to bed, he thought about his problem and then he dreamed the answer.”

Tinker supplied the name of the scientist. “August Kekulé and his discovery of the molecular structure of benzene.”

“It’s one of the first things you learn when you’re born to the intanyai seyosa caste.” Stormsong said. “You focus your mind on what you want to see.”

Esme nodded. “I wanted someone that could teach me how to use my powers. That night I dreamed that there was a red thread wrapped around my fingers, leading out of Lain’s guest bedroom and down her stairs and out her door. I followed the thread into the dark streets and found on the other side of the river a beautiful elf female sitting in a grove of flowering lemon trees with a golden dragon the size of a mountain behind her. She had a red ribbon tied around her eyes and it trailed down and became the thread around my fingers.”

Stormsong breathed in sharply. “Vision?”

“Who?” Tinker asked. “What?”

“Clarity was not the first dragon that the Skin Clan captured, but she was the last,” Stormsong explained. “It is said that she allowed herself to be captured, knowing that her genetic material would create the caste that would lead the uprising. Like the sekasha before them, the intanyai seyosa were created in mass numbers, ruthlessly culled and refined while they were still helpless infants. There was an exception — one attempt to distill a perfect copy of Clarity in elf form. The resulting female child took the name Vision as she was the product of Clarity’s prophecy. She was the most powerful intanyai seyosa ever born. Pure Radiance was her only child. None of the others could ever equal my mother because the blood of Clarity runs pure in her. I have just a pale, hollow reflection of her power. It is to be expected, though, as my father is of a dragon-born caste. When two dragon bloodlines are present in one child, they are often at odds with each other. It is very rare for them reinforce each other.”

“When I woke up, I went looking for the female in my dreams,” Esme said. “I found her in McKees Rocks. She was expecting me but there was no time for her to teach me more than a few things. If I was going to stop everything I could see in my dreams, countermeasures had to be set in motion immediately.”

It was the first time Tinker had ever seen Stormsong completely flummoxed.

“Wh-wh-what?” Stormsong said. “You found her? Here?”

Esme pointed across the river. “Yes, she’s been here since — well — I’m not sure. I think before the first Startup. Before that I think she was in Boston.”

“She’s in Pittsburgh?” Stormsong wasn’t processing the news well.

“Wait? Who exactly are we talking about?” Tinker was confused. “If Pure Radiance was Vision’s daughter, then we’re talking about Stormsong’s grandmother? Your grandmother is in Pittsburgh?”

Esme had said previously that Tooloo had taught her how to control her dreams. They had been in the middle of illegally obtaining elf DNA and bullying a local funeral home into cremating the dead Stone Clan kids, so Tinker had forgotten to follow up. Shortly after that, the oni blew up Tinker’s limo, rebreaking her newly healed arm.

It had been a bad, bad night.

Stormsong looked uncertain as she shook her head. “I’ve never met my grandmother. Vision vanished before the Rebellion ended. The Skin Clan had bound her hand and foot. She was guarded by Vigilance. Like Malice, Vigilance could be considered a dragon but in truth was a spell-worked beast, pieced together from shattered pieces of other creatures. He wasn’t as clever or powerful as the Ryu dragon that the Skin Clan had shattered down to make him, but he was massive in size with golden scales. Despite the shackles and the magical guardian, Vision managed to slip away. The Skin Clan sent Vigilance after her to bring her back. Neither one was ever seen again. It was assumed that Vigilance had killed her and gone wild. She couldn’t possibly be in Pittsburgh.”

“Tooloo has a bed made of dragon bones,” Tinker said.

Stormsong shook her head. “I can’t believe it is her. I know you would not lie about it but she went missing when our people needed her the most. We would have not won the war against the Skin Clan without Pure Radiance and the others to tip the scale.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Esme said. “I went over to Tooloo’s store earlier for milk and eggs. She gave me your mail.”

“My mail?” Tinker thought the tengu had been collecting that for her.

Esme went to the kitchen counter and hunted through dirty baking pans. “Yeah, it looks like a greeting card. It’s dated back in April. It’s postmarked New York City.”

“New York City?” Tinker took envelope that Esme handed her. “How long did Tooloo have it? Nothing has come from Earth since July!”

Esme shrugged. “She didn’t say.”

Tinker ripped open the envelope. Inside was a birthday card. It had a girl in a dress decorated with pink flowers. It read: To a special sister on your eighteenth birthday. “Oh shit, the twins sent me a birthday card!”

Tinker looked at the envelope again. It had been addressed to the Neville Island hotel but the Pittsburgh post office had forwarded it to her salvage yard. Ink stamps marked its passage from New York City in April to Elfhome days before her eighteenth birthday.

“Wait. Oh, that bitch! I remember Tooloo raiding my mail after the April Startup! She and her stupid chicken. She managed to slip this out from under my nose!”

Tinker headed for the door.

“Domi?” Stormsong followed. “Where are we going?”

“I’m going to get some answers out of Tooloo, one way or another.”