Harbinger

3: ROCK-A-BYE BABY, ON THE TREETOPS: REFRAIN

Louise jolted out of sleep. She flailed with the light sheet covering her. Her quiet cries of dismay turned to ones of frustration. Her twin, Jillian, had her left hand pinned to the futon mattress that they shared.

For a moment Louise was completely disoriented. She expected her old bedroom, the one she had shared with Jillian most of her life. The streetlights would shine through the one window to fall across the foot of their beds. There was always the hum of traffic, the sirens of distant ambulances and police cars responding to some unknowable emergency, and occasionally the bark of a lonely dog.

The airy space wasn’t their bedroom. It swayed ever so slightly in the wind. The smell of autumn leaves hung in the air. Elf shines floated like fireflies through the air, barely holding back the cave dark of moonless night.

“Oh,” she whispered as she realized that she was in Gracie’s small treehouse, far above the forest floor, on Elfhome. Their home in Queens was hundreds of miles and another universe away. The treehouse, while charming, was rustic in almost every sense of the word. Their playhouse on Earth had more bells and whistles before they blew it up. Electricity. Wi-Fi. Furniture. Direct access to the ground.

The twins were in the roughly eight-foot-square living room of the treehouse that looked like a Japanese teahouse. Tatami mats covered the floor. One wall was the trunk of the ironwood tree. The other three walls had sliding shoji doors. The east and west panels of translucent paper over wooden frames were closed against night drafts. The southern door stood open to the narrow patio that wrapped the treehouse. There was an overhead light fixture powered by small windmills but they weren’t allowed to turn it on. The oni might spot it. The only piece of furniture was a kotatsu table currently leaning against the wall to make room for their futon mattress. The rest of the area was taken up by the nesting box.

Gracie Wong Dufae — their biological father’s widow — was asleep in her tiny bedroom, another thirty feet up the massive tree. Proving that the tengu weren’t just humans with wings, the poor female had spent the day laying four huge eggs, each larger than an ostrich egg. They were sky blue with black speckles; apparently it was the normal coloration for oni crows. The twins had strategically missed all the drama; they’d deliberately spent the day exploring the hidden tengu village, returning only to find another egg had been laid in the blanketlined, temperature-controlled nest. Louise was glad they managed to save her unborn siblings but Gracie popping out eggs was a little weird and creepy.

“Oh, you little brats,” Louise whispered as she remembered the dream that woke her. Crow Boy — the yamabushi Haruka Sessai — was missing from his normal sleeping spot of the treehouse’s patio. It could mean that her dream had been true; he might have met or was meeting with Jin Wong even now to give the tengu spiritual leader a report on all that they knew.

“Hm?” Jillian woke. She tightened her hold on Louise’s hand.

“I dreamed that — that — that…” Louise stuttered to a halt. Had she told Jillian that her dreams had been coming true since they first turned on their magic generator? At first Louise didn’t know what was happening. She couldn’t see magic like Jillian could; she never thought that it would affect her in any way. By the time she realized she had a special power, Jillian was lost in grief. Her sister was still fragile.

“I dreamed of Mommy and Daddy,” Jillian raised their joined hands to wipe tears from her face. “Peter Pan had taken Mommy away to tell the lost boys stories. Daddy went too because he wanted to fly. We were tiny and helpless like Tinker Bell; just little gleams of light. We tried to find Mommy and Ming locked us in a birdcage like the one we saved Crow Boy from.”

Louise didn’t know what to say or do to make things right for her sister. Their grandmother hadn’t let them go to the funeral. They hadn’t gotten a chance to say goodbye or even confirm with their own eyes that their parents were dead. Louise hadn’t truly believed it until she talked with their Aunt Kitty, who had no reason to lie. Considering Jillian’s state, though, perhaps it had been for the best. Maybe Jillian couldn’t have taken the brutal truth.

What could Louise do? Her own dream pressed close, frightening not because it was of things that could not be changed in the past, but loomed over them as things that might yet come. Was Jillian strong enough to deal with all the things that Louise had seen in her dream? Did they have the time for Louise to even delay the truth?

She decided to start small. “In my dreams, the babies rode little hoverbikes to visit Orville. They wanted him to help them pick out new names. They’re not very happy with the ones we chose.”

Jillian laughed, sounding more like her old self. “What? Don’t you think Chuck will like Charlene?”

“No. She hates it,” Louise said. “Orville wasn’t any help. He doesn’t like his name either. He likes to be called Oilcan.”

“Oilcan?” Jillian let go of Louise’s hand to stretch. “Oilcan? What a weird name. How do you think he got it?”

“I’m not sure.” Louise frowned in the darkness at the innocent-looking incubator. While they were at the mansion, the babies said that Joy had taught them to dream walk, allowing them to explore. The babies had known about the caves under the house long before the twins. Were they really still restlessly exploring despite growing in eggs instead of suspended in frozen nitrogen? How did they interact with Oilcan? It didn’t seem safe, them wandering around like that, even if they weren’t really leaving their eggs. “I think we really need to pick other names for the babies.”

“I liked Charlene.” Jillian even looked more like herself, as her short “Peter Pan” haircut of June had grown out. Her hair had been a brash carrot orange after she’d bleached it in New York City in an attempt to disguise herself. The tengu had taken pity on her and produced a hairdresser to dye Jillian’s hair back to her original brown color.

“Charleeene.” Louise mimicked Chuck Norris.

Jillian laughed again. “Okay. Why don’t we just call her Chuck Norris Dufae and be done with it? No one seems to go by their real name on Elfhome. At least, not in our family.”

“I want to stay Louise Mayer.” Louise lay back down beside her twin.

“I want to stay Jillian Eloise Mayer.” Jillian shifted the blue-flannel pillowcase that housed the remains of her childhood huggy blanket Fritz to curl beside Louise. “Together, we’re Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. But what do we call the Jawbreakers?”

They’d picked out two girl names after considering hundreds. Louise couldn’t even remember what they settled on. Obviously the babies didn’t like the choices.

“Jawbreaker could be their middle names,” Louise said. “It not like we use our middle names. I bet no one outside our family knows what they are. We could use some other names that still mean Red and Green. Red. Rose. Ruby.”

“What’s wrong with Cherry? It’s a flavor of candy.”

Was that what they settled on? Louise couldn’t remember but apparently the babies didn’t like the name. It wasn’t as dramatic as Crimson Death. She was blanking on the shades of red. “Maybe Vermilion?”

“Gag!” Jillian cried. “Cerise.”

“That’s just cherry in French.”

“They won’t know.”

Louise wasn’t too sure of that. “Magenta.”

“Makes me think of Rocky Horror.” Jillian threw her hands up in the air and sang, “Let’s do the time warp again!”

“That might be a good thing.” Rocky Horror was cool and that’s what the babies wanted. Still it felt off. “Scarlet? Scarlet Witch. Scarlet Overkill.”

“Oh she would love that!” Jillian said. “Or Skarlet from Mortal Kombat. Finish him!”

“Scarlet Dufae.” Louise tried it with the last name that the babies had already claimed.

“I like it. It rolls. One down. Green. Moss. Olive.”

“No and no.” Louise vetoed both Moss and Olive.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. They just don’t feel — right. Emerald. Lime.”

“We’re Lime,” Jillian said. “Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”

In other words, both Lemon and Lime were off the list.

Louise tried to think of another green name. All that was coming to mind was Avocado. The babies’ names weren’t their most pressing of problems. If her dream was true, then the box full of baby dragons — possibly Joy’s brothers and sisters — had fallen into oni hands.

“Pickle,” Jillian said.

“What?” Louise asked in confusion.

“I’m still trying to think of green names. It sucks that this place doesn’t have Wi-Fi. We could look up shades of green. None of the ones I can think of sound like a little girl.”

“I don’t think they want to have names that sound like little girls.”

“All the green words I can think of is food. Basil. Mint. Pistachio. I think I’m hungry. I want ice cream.”

“Ice cream!” Joy cried from the shadows. The baby dragon bounded across the floor to their futon bed. She had a Gobstopper in either paw.

“Where you get that candy?” Jillian cried.

“Found them! Yummy! Nomnomnom!” Joy shoved both into her mouth to demonstrate.

Louise’s heart sank at the proof that Joy had raided Oilcan’s nightstand. It meant that her dream of Jin telling Tinker about the box was probably also true. Louise had noticed that the tengu leader had carefully given the impression that the babies would be born, not hatched. He’d dodged the question about how many women were pregnant with Dufae babies. He’d said nothing about eggs.

Crow Boy had told them that it normally took a great deal of ceremony to summon Providence’s spirit to discuss important issues. Impatience had vanished after the dragons had implanted the babies into Gracie. Joy was uncommunicative to the tengu, whom she saw as Providence’s property. She might tell the twins but her English mostly consisted of food-related words. It wasn’t that she couldn’t learn more, she merely refused to.

It meant that no one knew exactly what the dragons had done to the babies in order for them to survive.

When the twins had taken Crow Boy to the hospital, it became apparent that the tengu weren’t human at a very basic level. It was possible that the dragons had changed the babies so that they could thrive within eggs. They might be genetically tengu in addition to elf, dragon, and human. No one would know until the eggs hatched.

Louise didn’t care what kind of feet the babies had when they were born. Human. Crow. It didn’t matter to her. Jin probably avoided the issue because it would matter greatly to the elves. Would it matter to their older sister, Alexander, who obviously liked to be called Tinker? To their “biological” mother, Esme? To Oilcan, who probably was going to end up as their guardian? It made Louise uneasy just thinking about it.

Even more worrisome was the matter of the box. If only she’d known while they were robbing the museum to take all of the eggs. If only they’d tried to intercept the shipment to Elfhome. She and Jillian had been so focused on the babies, they hadn’t thought beyond their own needs.

There was a lot that Jin didn’t tell Tinker domi. It was possible that in all the chaos, the information had gotten lost. Had she and Jillian told Crow Boy everything that they knew? It had been July when they rescued the tengu youth out of the cage. It had been a frantic scramble to escape from the fortress of evil, get safely to Monroeville, and then rescue the Nestlings. It was now September. Louise had lost most of August while recovering from being shot by Yves. Surely, sometime while Louise hadn’t been fully conscious, Jillian had covered everything that they hadn’t told Crow Boy.

Did Jillian know everything?

After their parents died, Louise kept more and more secrets from her twin. Jillian had been so fragile. Louise had been afraid that if Jillian knew how truly perilous their situation was that Jillian would break. Even now, with all the surviving members of their family safe, she wasn’t sure if Jillian could handle more.

Louise had a terrible feeling that “more” was in store in the near future.

“I’m sorry, Lou.” Jillian distracted Louise from her quiet fears. “I lost it at the mansion. I was so scared for the babies. They’d become real to me — as real as Mom and Dad. They’re our baby brother and sisters — and I couldn’t see how we were going to save them. I’m angry at myself now. I should have known that the two of us can do anything when we put our minds together. We robbed the Museum of Natural History! We stole millions and millions of dollars from Ming the Merciless. We checked into the Waldorf Astoria and lived like queens. We rescued all those kids and…and…and…we’re Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo! We’ve been internationally famous video producers since we were seven years old with millions of fans around the world. We can do anything!”

Louise wanted to believe that Jillian wasn’t that broken after all. She might have grown stronger while Louise was sick. Or maybe Jillian was lying to herself. Maybe Jillian needed to believe she was stronger in order to be stronger. Louise didn’t know.

“You were great,” Louise said. “The fake elves didn’t know how scared you were.”

“It was just an act.”

“You could have won an Oscar for your performance.”

“It helped to be someone else,” Jillian whispered. “Someone a lot braver than me. Next time, I’ll pretend to be you. You were amazing.”

Louise hoped that there would be no “next time.”

“Oh!” Jillian made an odd hurt sound.

“What’s wrong?” Louise stood, ready to fight because fleeing would be impossible.

“Crow Boy!” Jillian had noticed that the teenager was missing. “I told him that he’d roll off the patio if he slept out there!”

Louise followed Jillian out onto the patio. Night pressed in around them, full of the rustle of leaves.

“That idiot!” Jillian peered down at the ground, two hundred feet below. The forest floor was lost in the darkness; it was like looking down into a well. “How do you think we’re going to get down to check on him? I don’t think tying our sheets together would work. They’d only get us twenty feet at most. Maybe if we made parachutes.”

“Shhh!” Louise pointed up to indicate the sleeping Gracie somewhere above them; it was too dark to see the tiny bedroom. “I don’t think he fell. I think he went to talk to someone.”

“In the middle of the night?” Jillian whispered.

“The warriors have returned.” Crow Boy’s voice came out of the darkness.

It was surprising how quietly he could fly. One moment the twins were alone on the balcony, and the next, the teenaged tengu was landing on the railing. With a soft rustle, he closed his large black wings. He’d abandoned all pretense of being human since arriving on Elfhome. He was bare chested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of blue jean shorts. Jillian must have gotten used to it while they were at the caves; she didn’t seem to notice his bird toes curling down to grip the railing tightly. Louise was still trying to see it as normal. It took all her control not to stare at his feet.

“You just left without telling us?” Jillian crossed her arms and looked just like when their mother would go into warrior princess mode.

“I’m sorry.” Crow Boy gave a slight bow. The tips of his black hair were still bleached blond from their attempts to disguise him in New York City. For some reason Louise found it comforting, as if they still had some claim on his loyalty. “I thought I would return before you woke up. The warriors, who had been out searching for Tinker domi, have returned to Haven. I saw Jin Wong! I never thought I would ever meet him; he left Earth before I was born. He’s been lost to us my entire life. He has this — this — calmness. It’s like a deep mountain lake.”

“You could have left a note,” Jillian grumbled. “‘Dear Jillian and Louise, I didn’t fall to my death.’”

Louise stuffed her knuckles into her mouth to keep from crying out in dismay. Was Jin still flying to warn their older sister or had that already happened too? Joy had the candy. Tinker had sent for Oilcan after Jin left. Yes, Jin had delivered Crow Boy’s report in full.

“What did you tell Jin?” Louise tried to keep her voice steady. “I know you — you — you probably told him about the babies and Joy and the box — but did you tell him about Ming? Crown Prince Kiss Butt? Flying Monkey Four and Five? Tristan and…” What had been Tristan’s older brother’s name? The elves at Ming’s mansion had talked about Esme’s half brothers and the mysterious “Eyes” only once or twice. Tristan had been scolded when he asked about his younger sisters, raised in secret from their mother, Anne. What was his brother’s name? “Lucien. His name was Lucien.”

“Monkeys?” Crow Boy’s confusion was clear on his face. “Crown Prince Kiss Butt?”

“They’re all back on Earth.” Fear tinged Jillian’s voice. “Aren’t they?”

Louise slowly shook her head. Crow Boy’s confusion she half expected, since she was using Esme’s nicknames for her stepfather, stepbrother and half brothers. Louise was sure she’d told Jillian about the conversation that she overheard at the mansion. She’d been so angry at Ming for stopping Tristan from seeing his mother. Ming made Tristan live alone even though he was still technically a child. In her dreams, she’d seen how lonely Tristan’s existence had been. Did she leave out that Tristan had been sent to help his older brother? “Lucien has been here on Elfhome the whole time. Tristan was sent to back him up in July. Ming came across too.”

“Yves?” Jillian whispered.

Louise flinched as the memories from the cave flashed through her mind. Huddling in the absolute dark. A killer nearby. The pain of being shot. Her blood spilling warm down her arm. She thought that Jillian and Crow Boy would have seen Yves’ body when they found her. There must have been a second cave-in.

I killed him. Louise opened her mouth but couldn’t force the words out. She tried for an less than honest truth. “He’s — he’s still on Earth.” Under a ton of rocks. Better him than her. He had a gun. She thought she was unarmed until she tried to do magic out of sheer desperation.

I did a Force Strike! Louise gasped as she realized that if she had done it once, she could do it again.

“What?” Jillian asked as Louise stared at her hand.

“We can call the Spell Stones,” Louise whispered.

Jillian squealed with excitement. Jillian put her left hand to her mouth and called the Spell Stones to cast a shield. Louise felt a sudden tingling flush like static electricity and the air pressure around them changed. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

The sense of power disappeared as Jillian bounced about the room in the dance of joy.

“We can do magic!” Louise whispered, full of happiness.

“We’re elves!” Jillian whispered loudly. “We can do magic! We’re domana elves!”

Oh, yes, that.

Crow Boy was looking slightly alarm. “I think I need to talk to Jin again.”

“No, don’t tell him!” The words were out of Louise’s mouth before she even knew what she was going to say. “No one can know that we can cast spells.”

“He’s my leader. I’ve dedicated my life to him.” Crow Boy said in a low, serious tone.

The words continued to pour out. “If you tell him, he’ll need to tell Tinker domi. Tinker domi will need to tell Prince True Flame. He’ll have to tell the current head of the Stone Clan, which is Sunder. If Sunder finds out, then everyone will die.”

“The tengu can’t lie to Tinker domi,” Crow Boy said. “We cannot afford to lose faith.”

“There’s lying and then there’s just not saying anything,” Jillian said.

“Jin isn’t even here in Haven,” Louise said as Crow Boy frowned at Jillian’s statement. “He’s in Pittsburgh talking to Tinker domi. He won’t fly back tonight. It’s four in the morning. He’ll sleep at one of the safe houses in the city. We need time.”

“Time for what?” Crow Boy asked.

“To be ready,” Louise said. She wasn’t sure for what.

Jillian gave her an odd look, obviously unsure if Louise was lying or not.

Crow Boy frowned at the floor, thinking. His left foot scratched at the railing as he considered Louise’s request. “If you had not pulled me out of that cage, saved the Nestlings, and got us all safely to Haven, I would never allow this. You could have left me in the cage — at the hospital — at the hotel — and gone on without me or mine at any time. It would have been easier and safer for you. I have seen you move mountains for the good of my people. You are Joy’s Chosen. While it goes against my training, I will keep my silence for now.”

“Thank you,” Louise said.

Jillian held up her finger. “What exactly are we getting ready for?”

Louise waited for the answer. Whatever truth had battered its way out of her, it was spent. Gone. “I don’t know.” She glanced around the room. The tengu gave them forest camo towels. She picked up a middle-sized one to use as a blindfold. “I might be able to find out.”

“You want to dream walk?” Crow Boy pointed toward Gracie’s bedroom. There were no lights on in it. Their talking hadn’t woken the female. “I could get Wai Sze. She’s the Flock’s dream crow.”

Louise shook her head as she tied the blindfold into place. She wanted to say yes. There was a little niggle in her chest that made it seem like a bad idea. As darkness closed in, the feeling grew. “She would tell Jin. She doesn’t really know me. She doesn’t trust us like you do. She sees us as her husband’s children. Small. Helpless. She will feel like she needs to protect us. She will stop us from doing what needs to be done.”

Jillian caught Louise’s hand and squeezed it tight. “We’ll kick butt and take names.”

Brave words. Jillian, though, was shaking.

Louise took a deep breath. She had only done this once before on purpose. It seemed as if she needed to enter search words to lock in on a vision. Last time it had been like being hit by lightning. What was coming? How did they prepare for it? Why shouldn’t they tell Jin or Gracie? She said that if Sunder found out, everyone would die. Why?

Was this going to work? Could she actually control seeing the future? There was something she was missing. The other times she had focused on their older sister. If magic worked some weird quantum effect on time, then at some distant point, she and Tinker had been within their mother’s body and then a test tube and bathed in their father’s seed. It could have just as easily been Louise that ended up in the salvage yard when Windwolf came over the fence. Tinker could have been the one who became Jillian’s twin…

“Hurry! Hurry! The time is at hand!” It was like plugging into an outlet. Power surged through her, sure and strong. “Clarity’s Vision reaches across time and space! All that she has put in place must come together or perish! Youngest to the oldest, Brilliance must stand against the darkness. Heed the words written by the father. He was guided by Vision. He provides the protection against the danger that comes for them all. When the times come, the youngest will save them.”

Then it was gone.

“Well,” Jillian said after a moment, “that was helpful. Not! What the hell did that mean?”

The power was gone but a stain of the image remained. “Something horrible is about to happen. Everyone is in danger. We have to do something. If we don’t, everyone will die.”

“Do what?” Jillian asked.

“What’s going to happen?” Crow Boy asked.

Louise shook her head. “I don’t know. Something horrible. Something huge. We’re the only ones that can save everyone.”

They sat in silence for a minute, lost before the vision.

“Okay,” Jillian broke the silence. “We’re not going to save the day stuck way up here with no power or tools or anything. We’re going to have to go down to the ground, get all our stuff, and get linked into whatever passes as internet here.”

The drop-down out of the treehouse was scary. Crow Boy took them one at a time. Louise first. It was even more scary than the first big drop on a roller coaster; those were safety tested. She tried not to scream but a squeak slipped out.

“It’s okay,” Crow Boy said. “I’ve got you.”

Louise nodded, not wanting to point out that what made it scary was no one had him. Somehow the trip had been less frightening when her transporter was a middle-aged tengu male instead of the fourteen-year-old. She knew that Crow Boy was stronger than an average human, and as a yamabushi, perhaps even an average tengu. Certainly all the adults treated Crow Boy with reverence. She had seen him, though, bound, hurt, and helpless. He was still a “boy” to her.

“They salvaged everything that we brought across,” Crow Boy said as he alighted next to a well-hidden storage shed. “What we didn’t get in the first trip, they went back for.”

“Everything” included the tall, mottled brown birds that came trotting out of the undergrowth to investigate them. She had made the mistake of letting Chuck Norris and the others pick out the self-driving truck during their rescue of the nestlings. The babies decided to take one transporting a herd of ostriches just because they wanted to see the birds firsthand.

The tall birds gathered around Crow Boy and Louise, cocking their heads to get a better look at the children.

“I swear, they seem even bigger in the dark.” Louise loved animals. It was hard, though, not to be a little afraid as the flock loomed over them.

“They are bigger,” Crow Boy said. “Wai Sze believes that they’re not fully grown; their mottled coloring is more like a chick’s than an adult bird’s. They’ve gained like a foot in height in the last month.”

“A foot?” Louise whispered in surprise. “Ostriches only grow to be between five and seven feet tall. They were all at least six feet tall when we stole them.”

“Wai Sze says that they’re not ostriches; they lack even vestigial wings. She thinks they might be moa.”

“Moa?” Louise repeated. “Moa were hunted into extinction over five hundred years ago.”

“There were experiments being done of injecting moa DNA into ostrich eggs,” Crow Boy said. “It’s possible that these are the result.”

“We stole the only living moas on Earth?” Louise whispered fiercely.

“I’m sure they can make more,” Crow Boy said. “Wai Sze says that because they were so special, they were most likely hand raised. They were fairly tame even when we first found them. Since they made good guard dogs, we kept them close to the camp and they bonded with us.”

He demonstrated by petting one on the neck. “I’ll need to get Jillian.”

In other words “I need to leave you alone with these birds.”

“Okay.” Louise reminded herself that she was supposed to be the brave one. She loved animals — even ones that towered over her and made deep rumbling dinosaur noises. She felt like they were very much alone deep in the virgin forest even though she knew thousands of tengu were asleep high overhead. The only light came from elf shines that drifted through the bracken, which was just enough to make out the barest details.

Crow Boy sprang up into the air, unfurling his wings with a loud rustle. He labored upward, the flapping growing quieter as he rose.

Something wrapped itself around Louise’s neck. She jumped, reaching for her throat in alarm.

“Hungry,” Joy complained from under her chin.

“Joy!” Louise whispered loudly. “You scared me!”

Joy blew a raspberry. “Mine!”

This seemed to be to the giant birds eyeing Louise closely. The moa rumbled and clacked their beaks and stomped their feet.

Crow Boy landed lightly beside her carrying Jillian.

“That’s just like being Peter Pan again!” Jillian said. “I love flying! I wish I had wings.”

“You would need more than just wings to fly,” Crow Boy said.

“It would help,” Jillian muttered.

It made Louise think of the babies who may or may not have bird bones and feet. Chuck Norris would want to be able to fly. Probably the Jawbreakers too. Nikola would want to be like his sisters. What were they going to do with the babies if they turned out to be tengu? Perhaps Orville was right to worry. “Will the eggs be okay? Unattended?”

“The incubator has an alarm on it,” Crow Boy said. “If the power fails or the eggs get too hot, several adults will be notified. We only have a short period of time before the nest mothers who turn the eggs show up and notice that you are gone.”

Louise nodded in understanding. If they wanted to keep things secret from the tengu — and thus the elves — they needed to move quickly.

Crow Boy had called it “a storage shed” but the structure looked more like a concrete bunker tucked under a hill. Most of the building was covered with earth and what looked like undisturbed forest detritus. Large ferns grew in strategic pockets to disguise vents. The heavy steel door was painted to match the dead leaves. The entire structure seemed invisible in the faint light of the elf shines that danced in the area. Despite the camouflage, the door had a number-pad keylock. Crow Boy punched in the code, opened the door, and turned on the lights. The interior was larger than Louise expected, with a Quonset hut high-arched roofline.

The tengu had recovered all of the twins’ supplies but had simply dropped them in one large pile in the center of the floor.

When she and Jillian planned the rescue of the nestlings, they’d loaded down the luggage mules with everything they thought they would need to escape to Elfhome. They hadn’t given much thought on what would come afterwards.

It was “afterward.” What did they need?

They’d brought a stunning amount of stuff. The food was long gone but everything else made a small mountain to sort through. Solar rechargers. Power strips. Survival blankets. Tools. Nonlethal weapons like Tasers and pepper spray. Signal repeaters. Spare tablets. Small 3D printers. Supplies for casting magic. A monster whistle. Hundreds upon hundreds of robotic mice. A fleet of luggage mules to haul it all.

The twins started to dig through the mound without a plan. They slowed down to a crawl, defaulting to dividing things into piles, hoping that organization would trigger inspiration.

Louise finally sat down in despair. Where did they even really start? What were they supposed to do? They were two nine-year-old orphans on a foreign planet against an army. They had broken toys and ancient magic that they didn’t fully understand.

“Let’s recharge everything that can hold a charge,” Jillian said after standing still for several minutes, thinking. “That way if we find that we need something, it’s ready to go.”

“I can do that.” Crow Boy picked up a power strip and plugged it into the building’s only outlet.

“We can do this,” Jillian said. “We’re smarter—”

“Than the average bear,” Louise said dryly.

“Bear. Oni. Human. We’re smarter than everyone.”

“With a brain the size of a planet,” Louise quoted from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

“And you can see the future.” Jillian gestured at Louise with one of the robotic mice. “You knew the moment that the hyperphase gate failed that Esme was saving Jin Wong. No one could have just guessed at that one. Jin Wong went through the gate the first time that the Chinese turned it on. Esme left years later. Both of them were thought to be five light-years away. You knew.”

“I don’t know now,” Louise whispered.

“Yes, you do. ‘Youngest to the oldest, Brilliance must stand against the darkness.’ That’s us! You and me and Alexander and maybe even Orville. We’re the great-great-great-grandchildren of Unbounded Brilliance.”

“‘Heed the words written by the father.’” Louise repeated what seemed to be a key phrase in the prophecy. She remembered her dream of Alexander — Tinker domi—talking about her doctored version of the Codex. “It has to be something that Unbounded Brilliance wrote.”

Louise found one of the spare tablets that didn’t have a dead battery. Esme had left them a digital copy of the Dufae Codex. It had been on an ancient memory stick inside a Chinese puzzle box. The twins had copied the journal onto all their devices. Louise flipped through the spell book.

“Maybe,” Jillian said with less certainty. “The word ‘father’ might have meant Leonardo Dufae. He made the gate that started this mess. Maybe he kept a diary too.”

Louise shook her head. “No, Sparrow delivered Dufae’s box to her partners in crime. They have the nactka. The oni plan to use them to do something horrible. Unbounded Brilliance knew what they planned; it’s why he didn’t just hand the box over to his parents after he stole it. He had a plan to counter the oni.”

“Stupid plan,” Jillian muttered. “He should have just opened up all the nactka and freed the baby dragons.”

If Louise had known what was in the nactka, that’s what she would have done. Twelve Joys would have been impossible to keep hidden but that was because Earth had no magic. Unbounded Brilliance had been on Elfhome when he stole the box. Why hadn’t he just opened them? Three universes would have been vastly different if he had. “We wouldn’t exist if Dufae hadn’t been in France to meet our great-great-great-grandmother.”

“Yay for us, but Unbounded Brilliance wouldn’t have been killed in the Revolution. He would still be alive now. The baby dragons would be free. The oni wouldn’t have the box to do whatever they’re going to do with it. And this book is thousands of pages long! How are we going to find what we’re looking before it’s too late?” Jillian’s voice quavered with fear.

Louise felt a flutter of it in her stomach. “We’ll figure it out.” They had to. “Okay. Let’s back up and rethink this.”

“You don’t think ‘father’ means Unbounded Brilliance? You just said—”

“Wait! You’re Unbounded Brilliance. You find out that the enemy has the nactka and plan to do something with them.”

“It would help to know who he stole them off of.”

According to Louise’s dream about Tinker, the box originally belonged to Iron Mace, who tried to kill Oilcan just a few days ago. Iron Mace didn’t know that the box had been recovered by Sparrow; he was just a tool, used and then abandoned. It was possible that Unbounded Brilliance realized that his uncle wasn’t the real enemy.

“Maybe Unbounded didn’t know.” Louise felt her way through what might have happened hundreds of years ago. “He sees his uncle’s spell-locked box. A box that most people don’t know how to open without the key word or phrase. Unbounded picked the lock because he’s curious and clever. Inside, he found a dozen bombs. Think about it. You find several doomsday devices. You don’t know who made it or how it works or, most importantly, if there are more of them somewhere else. The box belongs to your uncle so you don’t know who you can even trust with this information. Instead of destroying the bombs, you—”

“Try and figure out how to disarm them,” Jillian said. “Or at least get them far away from my family. I would want to keep them safe.”

“Yes! He went to Earth and did experiments! Hundreds and hundreds of experiments. That’s what the Codex is. It’s his findings of-of-of…” Louise fumbled as she scanned over her memories of the work. “He’s trying to figure out how certain spells work. Exactly — as in down to the decimal point — how effective they are.”

“Okay.” Jillian squinted at Louise. “Where are you going with this?”

“Unbounded had a plan,” Louise felt sure of this. “We would have had a plan. Run away to someplace safe. Use our time in hiding to figure out how to get around the bad guys. Go back and blow them all to pieces. Right?”

Jillian threw up her hands. “We’ve both read the Codex cover to cover. Well — skimmed it at least. There’s no storyboard or outline or even a project management flowchart.”

Louise picked up her tablet and opened up the Codex. “The first thing he does is figure out a way to ‘clean’ magic. Earth and Elfhome are mirrors of each other, except Earth doesn’t have magic. Unbounded Brilliance realizes if he goes to the same location on Earth where there is a powerful natural spring of magic on Elfhome, there will be some spillover onto Earth. It’s the same reason that Desmarais had a mansion in New York.”

Jillian sighed. She pulled up a notepad on her tablet and started to make notes. “Okay. You think if we work through the logic of what Dufae did, we can figure out what his ultimate plan was. He camps on top of a powerful source of magic, only to discover the magic is too incoherent to use. The crossing between worlds seems to affect the angular momentum of magic the same as throwing a disco ball into a beam of light. If you don’t know about quantum mechanics, ‘dirty’ would be one way to describe it.”

“The evil elves at the Desmarais’ mansion said something along the same lines,” Louise said. “The magic was too dirty to allow Desmarais to do major spells.”

Jillian consulted her own copy of the Codex. “So the first spell we have in the Codex is the cleaning one, which basically funnels in power and gives it all one alignment and funnels it out to the storage system that he invented. Then he has the initiation spell the one that sets up a connection between a domana and the Spell Stones so they can do magic.”

“He has some success with it. It needs to channel magic between worlds and the same diffusion process happens. He charts out the successes and fails.”

“Yes, and then we have all these shield spells.” Jillian flipped rapidly through the hundreds of pages that followed. “So many shield spells.”

“Shields only.” Louise noted as she slowly paged forward. “If the Spell Stones operate the way we think they do, then he’s writing these out these from memory. I think that’s why they’re in the order that they’re in — the easiest to remember to the hardest.”

Jillian flipped backward. “Yeah, I think you’re right. The first is the sekasha shield spell; even we can do that from memory. Hm, he has these weird pages of numbers and such after each shield. It appears that he was testing them to see how much damage they could absorb or something.”

“Maybe he wanted a shield that could protect against the doomsday device.” Louise’s guess was based on the evidence.

“Ewww,” Jillian said. “That’s bad.”

“What? Why?”

“If he found one then he would have stopped. The only reason to keep going and going was because none of them could shield against it. These are all the shields that the elves are going to use to protect themselves when the shit hits the fan.”

“Oh,” Louise said. “Oh, that is bad.”

“But…” Jillian started and then stopped.

“But what?” Louise asked.

“The only way that he could know that each shield failed is if he knows what he needed to block,” Jillian started to flip back and forth, looking for the clue.

“Oh! Yes! If we know what we’re blocking, then we could use our knowledge of quantum mechanics—” Louise said.

“And magic,” Jillian added.

“And magic to figure it out.”