Harbinger

22: GRANDVIEW

Jane’s little brother Marc had lucked into an insanely beautiful modern house on Grandview Avenue near the Monongahela Incline. Perched on the edge of Mount Washington, it had an unobstructed view for ten or twenty miles. The house was a blocky, white-walled, space-age-looking thing with multiple terraces and giant windows to make the most of the vista.

Jane had called Duff to let him know where she was headed and to double-check that Boo was actually with Marc. Duff had put her on hold, checked on Marc’s location, and let her know that Marc had just gotten home. The call had forewarned Marc; he opened up his garage doors as Jane pulled into the driveway. His repaired Hummer sat in the right bay, leaving the left bay empty for Jane’s SUV. Before Marc could close his garage doors, though, Nigel and Taggart and Hal walked out of the garage, heading across the street to the far sidewalk at the cliff’s edge. Chesty stoically stood beside Jane despite the fact that he’d spent most of the day so far penned up. The elfhound glanced up hopefully at Jane.

“Hal!” Jane snapped even though all three of men were guilty. It was probably Hal’s idea.

“It’s the first time Taggart has seen Pittsburgh like this!” Hal gestured to the vista even as he continued to walk toward the iron fence that lined the far sidewalk.

It was a stunning view. The cliffs of Mount Washington dropped off beyond the sidewalk, leaving nothing to obstruct the vista. In a single glance, one could see from Point State Park — where the Allegheny River met the Monongahela River to form the Ohio — all the way to the Cathedral of Learning rising over Oakland. At the foot of the cliff was Station Square, currently littered with train cars after the Oktoberfest derailment. Across the Monongahela River rose all the skyscrapers of Downtown. On the hilltops beyond the Allegheny River was the solid wall of green that was the virgin ironwood forest. Rainclouds blanketed the sky, threatening, dimming the entire vista.

Much to Chesty’s delight, Jane walked across to view it with the men. The big elfhound trotted in a wide circle around her, burning energy, tail wagging.

“We can see it even better from Marc’s,” Jane said, aware that Marc was following them across the street as if Hal had the gravity of a black hole. “It’s going to rain soon.”

Hal looked pained. “I wanted Taggart to get shots of the tower. From the street. It’s more impressive that way.”

“The tower?” Jane echoed in confusion. The only tower in the area was a block down the street from Marc’s house. It was tall, anemic, Eiffel-Tower-looking thing painted white and red. There was a little flat building tucked under it, housing WESA, which used to be the Pittsburgh NPR station. The public radio station had lost its US government funding, just like WQED. Whereas private investors had stepped in to take control of the public television station, the radio station had been abandoned. What was operating in its place was a pirate station, run by locals as young as twelve and as old as thirty.

Jane pointed just to be sure they were talking about the same thing. “The radio tower?”

Hal nodded and grinned in the way he had when he was trying to keep a secret.

“Why?” Jane let her voice to drop to a threatening level. All of the kids running the pirate station had joined the militia. Since the militia was using the spy cell model, Hal hadn’t been told that it was one of their communications hubs. Although it was possible that he’d guessed; he wasn’t a total idiot and the coded broadcasts were accessible by any radio.

Hal grinned tighter. “WESA appeals to a younger audience.”

Jane glared at him and he lost the grin.

Hal lowered his voice to a whisper. “Jane, I’ve been doing lots of research on successful rebellions. Historically, communication is key to any successful resistance. Radios have always played an important part in organizing coordinated action. KDKA is nice but it’s very public and very vulnerable and very…cowardly. Really. I haven’t been able to get in to see any of KDKA’s staff beyond your cousin. They’re afraid I’ll set the place on fire. Again.”

She was wrong. He hadn’t realized that they’d already taken over WESA. She shook her head. “I don’t want you drawing attention to the station.”

Nigel shifted to stand shoulder to shoulder with Hal.

“No, no, no, don’t evil dead twins on me,” Jane growled.

Nigel gave her an apologetic look for siding against her. “Elf fusion music is blowing up on Earth. It’s part of what is fueling people’s interest in Elfhome. If Tinker domi does manage to open up a path back to Earth, an episode on a pirate radio station devoted to the music would be huge.”

Jane hadn’t considered that the radio station could be anything more than a communication hub for the militia. This was the problem of having two hosts. Hal alone was easy to ignore; his way normally led to madness, fueled by his overconfident ego. Nigel, on the other hand, was so reasonable that it was hard to counter him.

“We’re here to talk to Boo,” Jane said.

“We could split up,” Taggart said. “It’s probably better that only you deal with this.”

“This” being “find out exactly what Kajo did to Boo.” Yes, it would be better if Boo had privacy for this.

“I can cover your crew.” Marc wore his kidney holster under his tank top. He held out his keys to show that he wouldn’t be locked out if she closed the garage doors.

“We can take Chesty with us.” Taggart gave her a smile that did warm fluttery things to her heart. “He would enjoy the walk.”

“Okay. Fine.” She was trying to get Chesty used to the idea that Taggart was part of the family now. She pointed at Taggart. “Chesty. Obey.”

Taggart patted his leg. Chesty went without hesitation, which was an improvement since they had first started working on it two months ago.

“Good boy!” Taggart rewarded Chesty with affection.

Jane walked back to the garage and hit the wall switch to close the big doors.

It was a good thing that Marc’s place was all windows and outside views because it was minimalist bare. He had no art on the wall or rugs on the polished hardwood floors. The only furniture on the first floor was an ironwood coffee table made by Geoffrey and a leather recliner bought at the thrift store Once More With Feeling.

Jane grabbed a cold beer out of the kitchen’s refrigerator; she needed something to focus on other than her feelings. She didn’t want to have this talk with Boo. She didn’t want to drag Boo through the emotional minefield of her kidnapping. Jane didn’t trust herself not to react yet; Boo didn’t need her anger and revulsion. After a moment’s thought, she took a beer for Boo too. Her baby sister wasn’t a baby anymore. All the Kryskills started to drink alcohol when they were ten or eleven, probably on the theory that if it wasn’t forbidden, it wasn’t as enticing.

Boo wasn’t on the first-floor terrace off the living room, nor the second-floor one off the spartan master bedroom. She was up on the roof terrace, under the protection of the lattice roof, her new wings flaring from her back in snow-white perfection. Her spill of curls was just as white, to the point where it was hard to tell where her hair stopped and her feathers started.

Boo had her eyes closed as she folded and extended her wings. While she had resisted the offer of getting her wings immediately after being rescued in July, she had decided to agree in August, when little Joey Shoji got his. The tengu created the spell tattoo with magic, impregnating the skin with ink, in what Boo described as “instant sunburn.” While the spell gave her wings, it didn’t instantly give her the muscle memory or the strength to use them efficiently. The tengu explained that flying was like learning any endurance sport; practice would be what made flight effortless, not magic.

“Fold,” Boo whispered as her wings closed. “Extend.”

In a rustle of white features, her massive wings spread.

She looked like a battered angel, dressed in a backless tank top and cut off shorts, and sporting vivid bruises on her alabaster skin after countless bad landings.

“Hey.” Jane held out one of the bottles. “Do you want a beer?”

“Sure!” Boo cried, opening her eyes.

Jane had just grabbed what was in the refrigerator. She hadn’t really looked at the label until she cracked hers open. It was a Church Brew Works Blue Valentine. It was a stout beer with chocolate and fudge undertones. It was a good beer, but strong. From experience Jane knew that kids rarely liked the more robust beers right out of the gate. But then, maybe the oni had been giving Boo beer to drink since she was little. Boo seemed excited by the prospect of drinking it.

Boo was sniffing her opened beer. “Wow, it smells like some kind of dessert.”

“Beer takes a little time to get used to,” Jane said to warn her.

It was nearly comical to watch Boo soldier through the first few sips. No, the oni hadn’t weaned her on beer.

“I normally have things like hard cider,” Boo said when she realized that Jane was watching her. “Or wine coolers.”

“You don’t have to drink it.”

“I want to,” Boo said. “He liked sweet drinks. Girly drinks. You guys all drink beer.”

“Kajo?” Jane said.

Boo nodded.

Jane took a long chug on her beer to give herself courage to dive into the conversation that she didn’t want to bring up. The one that she’d unconsciously avoided for over a month. “Boo, if we’re going to stop Kajo, we need to know everything about him. What does he look like? Where is his main camp? What you think the oni might be doing? Anything you can give us will help.”

Boo hesitated for a moment before saying, “Kajo’s a little taller than me. Just enough that I need to tilt my head up a little to look him in the eye.”

That made him damn short, as Boo hadn’t shot up like most Kryskills. She was only about five foot two.

“His hair is long and blond,” Boo continued, frowning in concentration. “Not white blond like mine but still very pale. He normally wears it in a ponytail but sometimes he braids it or he wears it in a man-bun. He doesn’t like having his hair so long but he was told to let it grow. His eyes are very green — they almost don’t seem real. You know in movies, when the actors use contacts to make their eyes really vivid? They’re like that. When I was little I used to dream that he had little emeralds instead of real eyes.”

Boo fell silent for a minute. She took another sip of the beer and cringed. “Oh, this tastes like a chocolate tart that’s gone bad.”

“Being a tengu might have changed how things taste to you,” Jane said.

Boo visibly braced herself to take another sip. “Kajo actually looks like a Disney prince. The chin. The cheeks. The nose. He’s beautiful. So beautiful I could never understand why he kept me. He could have anyone.”

Jane finished her beer as she struggled to keep her anger in check. The “beautiful” bastard who “could have anyone” had stolen a first grader who weighed less than fifty pounds. What kind of pervert wanted a girl that young?

“Five and a half feet tall, roughly. Long blond hair. Green eyes.” Jane focused on the important details. The hair could be changed but not the eyes or height. “Looks human?”

Boo nodded. “Yes, he looks like a normal person. He could walk down the street and no one would think, ‘Oh, there’s an oni.’ That’s why he wears the mask. No one would be scared of him otherwise, at least on first meeting him. Once you got to know him, you realized that he could be so ruthless. Sometimes it seemed like he had no heart — but then he would look at me so sad and say he loved me. Sometimes I believed him.”

It wasn’t much but at least it was more than they had before. She wondered if Marc knew a police sketch artist that he could trust.

Jane moved on. They needed to find the two possible Kajos before they could identify the real one. “Do you have any idea why Kajo would be moving around black willows? Did he put the trees in Frick Park so he could use them in some master plan?”

Boo shook her head. “The trees were here before everything. Before the oni reached Pittsburgh. Before Pittsburgh came to Elfhome. The elves surveyed this area extensively and monitored it for decades before the first Startup. Pure Radiance knew that something big was going to show up here. The Viceroy mapped out the ley lines, the springs, and all the wetlands that were infested with black willow. The seeds of the black willow are like those of a dandelion: real fluffy. Based on their DNA and the genetic drift, Kajo thought that some seeds got blown up into the jet stream during the Rebellion and came down somewhere in the Westernlands. He sees them as a mixed blessing. They’ve made moving around the virgin forest more difficult for the oni but they deterred the humans and elves from exploring extensively.”

Jane took out her phone and started to take notes. There was a lot to unpack from the statement, perhaps more than Boo realized. Her baby sister had been on the inside so long that she didn’t know what was common knowledge and what wasn’t.

Nigel and Hal theorized that the monster-call whistle took advantage of instincts encoded into creatures at a genetic level. For it to work, the beast had to have been doctored at some point with magic to reinforce those instincts into a behavior that could be quickly and readily commanded. Nigel and Hal had experimented with the whistle — carefully — to discover that while most wild creatures — songbirds, small mammals like squirrels, and most fish — didn’t respond, bioengineered animals like elfhounds did. (Chesty was not amused by the experiment but he would obey the monster call.)

Sparrow had betrayed her kind by working with the oni. Kajo must have received all his information about the black willows and the local area from her.

“Kajo is taking advantage of the fact that the trees are in the area but they’re not part of his plans,” Jane said to confirm she correctly understood what Boo reported.

“Kajo said that during the Rebellion they found that the black willows were too vulnerable to the Fire Clan and Stone Clan, especially if the two clans joined forces,” Boo said. “Nor are the trees really an urban warfare weapon — they’re slow moving and have trouble navigating around houses.”

Jane had to agree that if she and Hal had been able to deal with lone black willows in the past, then no, the trees weren’t really ideal weapons. Jane frowned at what she had just written. The Stone Clan hadn’t arrived until after Sparrow was dead; the female elf’s intelligence reports must have been extensive.

“Kajo had creatures he called horrors,” Boo said with uncertainty.

“Horrors?” Jane echoed.

“We were watching a movie one time. I didn’t like it. It was this little girl who was taken by a monster and her family was trying to save her. Danni came in and asked what we were watching. Kajo said, ‘A movie about a kaiju’ and Danni didn’t know what a kaiju was, so Kajo said, ‘It’s a horror — a river horror.’ Danni saw how much the movie upset me and made me watch it to the end. She had figured out that the little girl in the movie would die.”

The more Jane learned about this bitch Danni, the more she wanted to kill her.

Boo continued. “The oni had been developing monsters on Onihida. They couldn’t get them from their world to Elfhome — not with half the Earth between their two access points. That’s why they kidnapped Tinker domi. If they had managed to keep her gate to Onihida open, they could have brought all their monsters and troops through the gate. Before they came up with the idea for the gate, they focused on smuggling in genetic material to build monsters with.”

“Were the namazu the only horrors Kajo has here in Pittsburgh?”

Boo gave her a look that said that she didn’t know for sure. She whispered, “Kajo never trusted me. He said he couldn’t tell me because the Eyes would kill me if I knew too much.”

Jane wanted to be sure that Danni died slowly. She tried to coax out a little more information. “You think there are more horrors than just the namazu?”

“They would let things slip.” Boo said. “Little things. By themselves, it meant nothing, but after a while, you could piece things together. Every Shutdown, the oni would ship a vast amount of goods to Pittsburgh. A lot of it was legal to import like food, blankets, clothing, and building materials. Kajo had underlings that handled those shipments. He was never involved unless it was some luxury item that he thought his underlings would keep for themselves. Caviar. Kobe steak. European chocolate. Cashmere sweaters. Silk sheets. If was something illegal, like guns, Lord Tomtom handled the deliveries on the theory that if something went wrong, only his people would take the fall. Now and then, though, the oni would bring something in that required everyone to work together to make sure it crossed safely.”

Boo reached out and gripped Jane’s hand tightly. “That’s what Kajo was doing in the Strip District the day I saw him with Danni. The day he took me. He was supervising the delivery of something too important to trust to Lord Tomtom. It was in this big shadowy warehouse. After I’d been tied up and gagged, they gathered across the room where there was a large animal in a wooden crate. It was hurt. I could smell blood and hear it making sounds of pain. They were talking in Oni and I didn’t know the language yet. There’s a lot of words, though, that Oni doesn’t have. Truck. Gun. Highway. Computer. Internet. When you’re talking in Oni and you hit one of those words, sometimes the rest of the sentence comes out in English. Kajo and Lord Tomtom flowed in and out of English as they talked about what to do with what was in the crate. The conversation made no sense to me, but helpless as I was, it is forever etched into my mind.

“They smuggle genetic material for horrors onto Elfhome inside large pregnant animals, like cows or horses. They decided to kill whatever was in the crate because it was making so much noise. I think it was a cow. I didn’t see whatever came out of it. Lord Tomtom was unimpressed by it. ‘It’s just a building block,’ Kajo said. ‘A tiny piece for something bigger.’ That made Lord Tomtom laugh and say, ‘Tiny? Yes! Everything you’ve made is far too small to be a horror.’ Kajo dismissed his complaint with, ‘We can make them bigger anytime. Temperament is more important than size.’ Danni took possession of whatever it was to get it safely out of the city; I don’t know what she did with it. I know that Kajo went several times down to the Strip District during Shutdown to handle something that he didn’t trust Lord Tomtom with, but I never went with him and he would never talk about it later.”

Jane took deep breaths, not wanting to rage in front of Boo. Her baby sister didn’t need her anger. She couldn’t imagine the terror that Boo had gone through that day, unsure if the oni would slaughter her as casually as they killed the animal in the crate.

“I’m sorry I’m so useless.” Boo’s voice broke with emotion. “I knew that in the end everyone in Pittsburgh would be in danger. They would talk casually about how they would deal with the police and the EIA. I should have worked harder to learn what they were doing but I was too scared. Anytime I tried to learn more, one of the Eyes would say, ‘I know what you’re doing,’ and then tell me exactly what I had planned. It was if they crawled into my head and listened to my thoughts. They always knew. I couldn’t do anything.”

“Oh, baby!” Jane gathered Boo into her arms and held her tight. “You stayed alive! That’s all that matters! That’s all we wanted! We just wanted you back, safe and sound.”

Boo tried not to cry but slowly her defenses crumbled until she was wailing ugly tears. “I’m so useless! Useless!”

Jane rocked her, trying to figure out how to make this right. Boo was a deep well of knowledge, but it was so fragmented and every “I don’t know” would cut deep. Worse, Boo would feel responsible for every death and disaster that happened in the upcoming conflict. She would feel like she could have prevented it. This was Jane’s fault for letting the fear of what she might learn keep her from trying to pump Boo for information. She should have just opened the taps, let everything pour out. It would have let Boo feel useful.

“You’re not useless,” Jane said. “We should have been asking you more questions. You have no idea what we need to know, so how can you know what to tell us? Let’s see what we can figure out about what is happening now with the trees.”

Boo nodded, sniffing loudly, but at least she stopped crying.

“Let’s start simply,” Jane said. “It’s okay if you can’t answer me. I need to know where the holes are before we can try to fill them. Okay? Now, where did you live when you were with Kajo?”

Boo sniffed again and wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “We moved around a lot — usually during Shutdown. I think it was so that Pure Radiance couldn’t ‘see’ what we were doing. The Eyes were blind to what was happening on Earth when they were on Elfhome and vice versa. During the winter we lived someplace in the city, usually somewhere fairly deserted. The nicest place was a cul-de-sac in Mount Lebanon; Kajo and I lived in a big stone house with fairy-tale-sized fireplaces and lattice windows. I felt like Rapunzel or Belle — a girl who wasn’t a princess being held captive in a castle by a monster. The worst place was a hotel downtown. It should have been the nicest; it was deluxe three-bedroom suite. I could see all of Downtown from the windows. They put bars on the inside of the windows and doors, though, making it one big prison cell. I wasn’t allowed out all winter. There was a television but it didn’t work. All I could do during the day was sleep or read or do homework.”

“Homework?” Jane echoed in surprise.

Boo puffed up her cheeks in embarrassed anger. “Kajo made me do schoolwork. He got these workbooks from Earth: one hundred and eighty days of boring stuff that I’d never get to use because I was never going to get away from him. I had to do six pages every day. I was up to eighth grade before he transformed me into a tengu and abandoned me at Sandcastle. In the evenings, if he didn’t have to go out and oversee something, we would play shogi.”

“What’s shogi?”

“It’s a stupidly complicated game. You’ve got eight different types of pieces that all move differently. Most of the pieces can get promoted and that changes how they can be played. I always lost. I was getting better. Kajo said he didn’t like playing against the Eyes because he always had to lose. While we played, we’d talk about his favorite books.”

Jane had been avoiding this talk because she hadn’t wanted to hear how Kajo sexually assaulted her baby sister. Their daily routine sounded fairly innocuous. There were so many questions she pushed down. She didn’t want Boo to relive the bad. She didn’t really want to hear the answer and not be able to immediately kill Kajo.

What was a safe question? One that Boo could answer? Had to lose. Did that mean he lost on purpose? Boo probably didn’t know the answer to that either.

“What kind of books?” Jane asked to keep the flow going.

“Where the Wild Things Are. Treasure Island. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Phantom Tollbooth. Redwall.”

“Those were his favorite books?” They were all children’s books written in English. It was a weird choice for an oni.

“Kajo grew up on Earth. His people had been trapped there for thousands of years. They knew from the beginning that they needed to move slowly when they invaded Elfhome. Stay hidden. They couldn’t take on all the elves; not with how powerful the domana are. Windwolf proved that during the first Startup when he kicked the Americans’ asses. Every time we moved, it would be dark enough to cloak us but not so late to make people wonder why we were out in the streets. Any house we used was emptied of everything, scrubbed clean, and then burned to the ground. We only stayed in the city when tracks in the snow would betray our movements. For most of the year, we lived deep in the forest.”

Jane nodded, her mind racing. She could see why Boo thought her information was useless. Kajo had been good at covering his movements. Boo had been transformed into a tengu in the spring and given into the care of an underling at Sandcastle. Kajo probably changed camps immediately afterward, nullifying any secrets that Boo had about his current location.

The important fact was that Kajo didn’t stay with the main oni force. He and Boo always lived in a small separate encampment. A couple floors of a hotel. A house. It meant that if the larger camps were found, Kajo remained hidden. It also meant that he probably wasn’t at the camps that Prince True Flame, Windwolf, and the Harbingers were attacking. Law most likely had spotted Kajo, possibly with Boo’s replacement.

It was autumn. If Kajo kept to his pattern, his camp was still hidden deep in the forest. He probably wouldn’t be able to move back into the city for winter. Things had changed. Humans were now aware that the oni existed. Jane’s family had spent the last two months organizing Pittsburghers into a secret militia scattered throughout the city. The oni couldn’t move about as easily as when Pittsburgh was routinely flooded with off-worlders. The humans who had been previously unaware of the danger would be alarmed if strangers suddenly moved into or even through their neighborhood. There would be dangerous questions raised.

“Tell me about the forest camps,” Jane said.

“What about them?”

“Were they north, south, east, or west of Pittsburgh? How far from the Rim were they? How many oni were there? Anything you can tell me is useful.”

Boo looked doubtful. “I know that the main camps were in the east so that they could use the train or the Monongahela River to transport bulk goods beyond the Rim. We normally camped in the west or the south. Our camps would almost always have these stones with spells chiseled into them that were anchored into a strong ley line or a magical spring. They created illusions of an empty forest. People could walk into our camp and not see the buildings or tents or even our guards. It made it a little wonky, though, trying to find the outhouse. There was one time we drove all the way down I-79 to I-70 and then across to the Rim to outside where Wheeling used to be — or at least still is, kind of. Anyhow, we took barges downriver from there to where a small river they called the Muskingum joined the Ohio. It was my favorite camp. They didn’t set up a cloaking spell because we were so far away from Pittsburgh. They could tuck the barges up the Muskingum, out of view of anyone using the Ohio. The ironwoods screened the camp. Kajo had them make us this really big compound that had a stream, and a garden, and a swing and even a treehouse. I felt sad when we left because they always dismantled any camp we set up. I liked the treehouse.”

“How many oni were at that compound?” Jane asked.

Boo cringed, shrugging. “I was never allowed out of our private area.”

“I’m guessing about a hundred,” Jane said to test a theory. “Just to ballpark it.”

Boo made a face. “I suppose it would have been around a hundred warriors when we were in the forest. Kajo always had a full guard while we were out where a pack of saurus might be. They’re not spell-worked, so there’s no controlling them with a monster call. When we were in the city, we would have little more than a dozen people, counting me. Most of them were greater bloods like Kajo. There would always be one of the Eyes with us, usually Danni, but sometimes Adele or Felicie. Kajo did most of his work while we were in the forest, so we would make camp in March and strike it in late October.”

“So the only time that the tengu came to where you might have seen them was in the forest?” Jane said.

Boo nodded. “I don’t think they ever saw me but I’d catch glimpses of them as they flew in and took off.”

Pieces were fitting together; Jane didn’t like the picture that was forming. Kajo kept separate from the main force, sometimes putting as much as a hundred miles between them and himself. He kept hidden at all times, leaving his camp only to oversee something that couldn’t be trusted to an underling. Law had reported seeing Kajo with about a hundred oni breaking camp and heading toward the river. Yumiko said that the male used smoke and mirror tactics. Combining the two, the black willows had to be a distraction. But for whom? Most of the elves were in the east, fighting what they saw as the main oni force. The only human who spotted Kajo was Law. The female forager had been outnumbered a hundred to one. If Kajo had been aware of Law, he could have killed her easily. Jane wouldn’t have been called in if the black willows hadn’t been roaming where they shouldn’t be. The same for the EIA. That left just the tengu.

“My people are spread thin,” Yumiko had said. “So I called in the guardians of the Dahe Hao.”

Was that Kajo’s real goal? To distract the tengu from the Dahe Hao? What would Kajo want with a spaceship? Or was it something other than the ship that he was after? Jane and her team had filmed in Turtle Creek shortly after Tinker escaped from the oni camp that been located inside the old Westinghouse Air Brake factory. It had been a careful tightrope walk of explaining the inexplicable condition of the valley to their viewers without letting out any of the information that the tengu had told Jane. Yumiko had mentioned a cloaking spell, saying it might be the source of the odd freezing blue haze filling the area. It wasn’t until Boo talked about not being able to find the outhouse because of an illusion cast on Kajo’s camps that Jane fully realized the implications. To keep the illusion constantly running and covering the entire mile length of the old Westinghouse Air Brake building would have required a great deal of power.

To cast a spell that was able to transform an entire species of people into another would also need a great deal of power.

Was Kajo looking for a place to use the contents of the box?

“Shit!” Jane breathed out the curse, her mind racing. She pulled out her phone, dialing Duff, even as she charged downstairs.

Boo followed behind her. “Jane? Jane? What is Kajo going to do?”

Duff answered his phone with, “You know, I got to thinking, I could ask her — the girl I kind of like. It would be a weird first date but then she would know what she was getting into — although she probably knew that after the entire namazu thing—”

“Duff, activate all our troops!” Jane ordered.

“What?” Duff and Boo both cried.

“Kajo works in layers. The black willows were to distract the tengu out of Turtle Creek, but the trees would have walked right into the back of the enclaves. He wanted the black willows to soften up the elves’ defenses prior to his push into Oakland.”

“Putting out the blast,” Duff said. “Activating all troops. What’s happening?”

“Kajo is looking for a large source of magic,” Jane said. “He was heading to Turtle Creek first. I think he plans to target the spell at the elves. Once he triggers the spell, he’s probably going to unleash an attack on Oakland to take out the enclaves.”

“You don’t think he’s going to target humans?” Duff said. “We’re heavily armed and outnumber almost everything on this continent.”

“It’s a genetically keyed bomb. The humans in Pittsburgh range from Chinese to African to Vikings with even some Neanderthal randomly mixed in. If he’s smart — and he is — he’ll use the first bomb to take out the elves’ heavy hitters: the domana.”

Duff cursed. “Windwolf is deep in the forest surrounded by the entire oni army.”

“Not all of it.” Jane paused in Marc’s living room. Through the massive windows, she could see down the Ohio River to Brunot Island and up the Monongahela to Panther Hollow. The only movement on the water was from schools of jump fish. The skies were heavily overcast with rain clouds creating a thick blanket of gray. “Kajo probably has a platoon or a full company that has come upriver from somewhere around Wheeling. He’s got barges, so he has at least one tugboat.”

“They would have to get past…I don’t know — a half dozen lock and dams?” Duff said. “A dozen?”

Jane closed her eyes and thought hard. She’d spent an entire week in July looking for the namazu nests. She’d gotten to know the three rivers intimately. There was a lock and dam on the Ohio at Neville Island. The Allegheny’s lock-and-dam system had remained on Earth. Monongahela’s first dam was near Turtle Creek. Law had spotted Kajo in the forest north of Turtle Creek, heading south. It wouldn’t make sense for him to boat up to the first dam and then hike in a huge circle. It would make sense if he’d cut through the forest north of Oakland, heading west to east.

Where would she put a large attack force in the west, where it wouldn’t be easily stumbled over by humans or spotted by tengu who would have been flying up the Allegheny to reach Haven?

“Did any of our scouts go out to Herr Island?” Jane said.

“Where’s that?” Duff said, which meant that the answer was probably “No.”

“It’s on the Allegheny River, under the Thirty-First Street Bridge,” Jane said. “The Rim cuts right across it. Half of it is a bunch of abandoned office buildings and other half is virgin forest.”

“If it’s that’s close to the city, then it might still be connected to the traffic cameras,” Duff said. “Hold on!”

“Wait!” But the line had gone quiet as Duff put her on hold. Duff was using the phone system at the bakery that had multiple landlines with the ability to have several lines connected at once. He was probably calling his computer guru bunny.

Jane pulled out her ancient pocket radio and turned it on. Marti Wulfow was spilling out coded orders for all militia troops to assemble in Oakland. Duff had gotten the blast out before checking the cameras. “Good boy!”

“Boo, the others went to the radio station.” Jane trotted down to the garage stairs. Boo followed her, wings fluttering nervously. “I’m going to pick them up. Stay here, wait for Marc.”

Jane hit the power button on the garage door. It rattled upward. “I won’t have time to fill Marc in completely. I need you to—”

“Hello?” Roach ducked down to look under the rising garage door. His hair was still damp from a shower and he was holding a stuffed bear and a box of candy. He stared at Boo’s wings with stunned surprise. “Oh. Um. Hi.”

Oh, shit, she had forgotten Roach was meeting her at Marc’s.

“Billy!” Boo cried and leapt at him.

Roach’s dismay vanished to a huge grin. “Baby Boo!” He dropped the presents to swing her around in a circle. “Baby Boo, you’re found! You’re found!”

“We have incoming!” Duff suddenly came back on the line. “Incoming on Liberty Avenue heading east toward—”

The line went dead.

“Duff? Duff?” She checked her signal. No bars. The cell phone network was down. Jane realized that her pocket radio had gone to static. “Shit, shit, shit.”

The automatic light on the garage door had gone off too. Jane flipped the light switch beside the power button. The big shop lights stayed dark. The power had gone out. WQED might have a backup generator but the underground pirate station of WESA probably didn’t.

“Damn, damn, damn, damn,” Jane swore as she scrambled into her SUV. In the glove box were the radio headsets that they’d pulled together just for this type of emergency. “This is Beater One, are we good?”

“Oh, thank God!” Duff said over the headset. “Power is out here. I don’t know what to do.”

They had had to return the headsets that they’d borrowed from Team Tinker in July but had spent the last two months finding replacements. Only a handful of their team leaders had one and they wouldn’t be able to contact their squad members if the phones were out.

“I’ll see what can be done about Bullhorn.” Jane used their code word for WESA. She dug out her map of Pittsburgh. There was a steep ravine between the river and the enclaves. There were only two bridges across it until Liberty Avenue climbed high enough to meet the plateau that Oakland rested on. “Have our teams head for Orphan’s.”

“Roger that,” Duff said.

Her team came jogging up the street, saving her from having to decide what to do with Boo.

“Duff pulled the trigger,” Taggart said. “He didn’t give a rendezvous point past Oakland. What’s up?”

Jane explained the oni attack. “They’ve taken out the cell phone towers and the power system. They’re going to attack the enclaves. I’m having Duff send our people to Sacred Heart.”

“Wait, what?” Roach said. “Oakland is under attack? Andy, Guy, and Geoffrey are at — oh, wait — Andy and Guy were going with Oilcan to move something heavy. They said something about ice cream. I think they’re on the South Side. Maybe. Depends on how long the trip took. Geoff wanted to watch the elves build the wall.”

Jane cursed. “I’m going to Oakland.”

“I’m coming with you,” Taggart said. Her dismay must have shown on her face. “Surprise attacks by insurgents used to be my morning wake-up call.”

Jane nodded and turned to Marc. She wanted to head off her little brother from trying to come with her. If he did, Boo would want to come too. “Find a generator and get it hooked up to Bullhorn. We need them back on the air.”

“I can help,” Roach said.

As Jane made sure that her little brother nodded in compliance, she realized that Hal had detoured to the back of her SUV. He was getting something out of his backup bag. “Hal, what are you doing?”

“I realized long ago that our technical prowess was also our greatest weakness. I decided to rely on a more primitive and thus more robust method to spread the news of attack.”

“Hal, what did you do?” Jane said.

“Sheer genius is what I’ve done!” Hal pulled out a flare gun, pointed it skyward, and pulled the trigger. “Light the signal fires!”

The flare shot up into the sky and flashed to orange against the gray storm clouds.

“Damn it, Hal, all you did was tell the enemy our position!”

“Wait for it,” he murmured.

There was a flare of color in the skies over Oakland as fireworks exploded against the clouds. A moment later another went up over Hill District. Even as the two sites fired their second rounds, a rocket lifted off from the Steel Building.

“See!” Hal shouted. “The beacons of Oakland are alight, calling for aid. War is kindled. See, there are the fireworks on the Cathedral and the Hill District, and flame on the Steel Building, and there they go speeding south: Mount Washington, Beechview, Dormont, and Castle Shannon on the borders of the Rim.”

Behind them, a string of fireworks went up, just a handful from each site but enough to mark a line heading deep into South Hills. Jane had no idea how he’d arranged it.

“It was glorious, wasn’t it?” Hal breathed out as the last firework faded away.

“Brilliant!” Nigel agreed.

Naturalists!

“Come on,” Jane said. “Let’s go.”