Harbinger

6: MONSTERS IN OUR MIDST

Jane Kryskill stared at her phone, willing it to be silent.

She was in the middle of a rare production meeting at WQED for her team’s new television show: Monsters in Our Midst. In June, they had put Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden on hiatus to focus on the new show. Outwardly, the two shows were nearly identical: Hal Rogers discussed how to safely deal with Pittsburgh’s dangerous monsters. The emphasis had been shifted from “natural” monsters like strangle weed to bioengineered weapons of war like the wargs. It was such a small change that most people didn’t pick up on it. The new format also helped to secretly organize their viewers into a trained militia willing to protect their city against the oni invasion. Every episode, Hal would sing the praises of some resident who came forward to help him eliminate the oni-borne threat, calling them “Hal’s Heroes.” He would gift them with a blue boonie hat. Jane’s family sold Hal’s Heroes merchandise as a way to scout for potential militia members, who were then set up in spy cells so that despite their loose recruiting method, a strike against the militia wouldn’t uncover all the members.

No one at WQED had been told about the show’s real agenda. Her coworkers might guess, but if asked they could honestly say that they knew nothing about the militia’s activities.

The deception had made Jane uneasy; she didn’t like lying to friends and coworkers. But then she found out that reporter Chloe Polanski had been working as an oni spy. She knew that Polanski had the morals of a snake but Jane hadn’t known how low the woman had sunk. Nor could she be sure that Chloe worked alone. Pittsburgh’s three television stations were logical targets of any convert activity. There was no way Jane could be sure that WQED didn’t have its own infestation of oni spies.

Jane’s phone had just vibrated with a call from her little brother, Duff, that she couldn’t answer. Duff ran the communication hub for their covert militia. He could be calling with anything as trivial as yet another glitch to her impending wedding or as important as a warning that heavily armed oni forces were spilling into the city.

If it was about her wedding, he wouldn’t call a second time. He would wait for her to return his call. If her phone rang a second time, it was a life-or-death emergency. Duff knew that nothing short of an oni offensive — not even her seemingly cursed wedding — was more vital than keeping the show on the air and running smoothly. The fate of Pittsburgh might balance on the militia that they were building behind the façade of Monsters in Our Midst. Her boss, Dmitri Vassiliev, was hands-off since MiOM had proved as successful as PB&G but he had a strict “no cell phones at meetings” policy. Even Jane could not break the rule; she was broadly skirting it just having her phone out.

Not that the “production meeting” was being very productive. Somebody had put “Jane’s wedding” on the conference room schedule board. Nor did it help that someone else — most likely multiple people — had decorated it. She suspected the entire art department had been involved — partly because of the quality of the work, but mostly because of the massive quantity of the art. The pictures had been printed onto paper and tacked beside the board with sticky putty until they covered the entire wall. There were wedding bells, churches, hearts, ribbons, roses, cupids, and an odd assortment of “romantic pairings.” There was a very swoon-worthy drawing of her fiancé, Keaweaheulu Ka’ihikapu Taggart, as a bare-chested Tarzan and a “Jane” with a yellow Victorian gown and a sniper rifle. Another had a scruffy “Aragorn” Taggart and Jane as a blond Arwen. There were a handful of other pairings that Jane didn’t recognize but they were obviously from some popular fantasy work. (The art department folks were all romantic-minded geeks.)

Hal was being Hal because the schedule board was there, reminding him in the most romantic of ways that Jane wasn’t marrying him. At the moment, Hal was standing on the conference room table, demonstrating his new toy: a bullwhip.

“I had one of these in grad school,” Hal was saying, making it crack loudly. “I went full-on Indiana Jones: bullwhip, safari shirt, brown fedora. UC-Davis took the whip away from me; the students were complaining. I don’t know why. The archeologists shouldn’t be the only ones to get to have fun!” Hal pretended to be addressing an undergraduate student. “Cytosine! Guanine! Adenine! Thymine!” Hal cracked the whip at his imaginary student with each scientific term. “If you want to call yourself a biologist, you need to know the basics!”

Dmitri was holding up a chair like a lion tamer. “Sit!” he commanded. “Sit!”

There was a reason that their production meetings were rare. (Jane was letting Hal keep the bullwhip in favor of the box of dynamite she had confiscated and stashed with her cousin, Roach. Where was Hal getting his endless supply of explosives?) Hal’s chaos, at least, was keeping anyone from noticing that Jane had checked her phone.

Could Jane get up and walk out of the meeting to find some place more private to call Duff? Everyone from station manager down to head of accounting was crowded into the conference room with her but nothing was getting done, not with Hal trying to prove…something…with the bullwhip.

Jane looked at the meeting’s agenda memo. They had already covered all preproduction issues for their next six episodes including budget concerns. All they really needed to do was make delivery of rough-cut video for the upcoming episode and discuss a handful of postproduction details. It shouldn’t be too harmful if Jane slipped away. Hal ignored mundane work issues, using his position of “star” to skip anything that could be boring. Could she trust Taggart and Nigel to cover for her?

Taggart was working on his laptop, ignoring Hal’s insanity. His ability to generate a pocket of calm in the middle of chaos was one of the many things that she loved about him. They were running behind on the rough cut as every frame needed to be checked to make sure they hadn’t included anything that gave away their many secrets. Taggart had a video editor open in one window but in the other he was answering an email. Jane’s mother had discovered Taggart paid more attention to the fine details of their wedding than Jane did. Her mother called it “getting the groom’s input” but mostly it gave her plausible deniability if she forgot to ask Jane about something truly important. Jane hated to dump yet more of her responsibilities onto Taggart but she supposed that was part and parcel of getting married. (Every day she discovered new joys of marriage — the only downside so far was the actual event.)

Nigel was patting his pockets and glancing at the floor in an out-of-character air of alarm.

“What’s wrong?” Jane asked.

“I’ve seemed to have lost my snake.” Nigel looked under the table, making everyone sitting at the table push back from it as an Elfhome-honed defensive mechanism kicked into overdrive.

“Snake?” asked the head of Accounting, Joe McGreevy. He was a big man with a Neanderthal-like response to snakes: grab the nearest item and use it to club any snakelike object to death. The clubbing usually only stopped once both snake and club were reduced to pulp. Everyone in the room edged away from Joe, taking their belongings with them.

“What snake?” Dmitri said in a tone of voice that seemed like he was afraid that he’d heard correctly but was hoping otherwise.

“I found the most beautiful snake out in the car park. I was afraid he’d get run over, so I put him in my pocket. Just a little thing.”

Hal paused, whip cocked. “Banded with red and black and yellow?”

“The very one!” Nigel cried, sounding like a British schoolboy. “Yes, I know it was most likely venomous with those colors, but it was such a wee thing!”

That triggered a sudden exodus from the room with the exception of her team and Dmitri. Taggart didn’t look up from his laptop but changed to sitting cross-legged on the table.

Dmitri put down the chair and stood on it. “This changes nothing. We still need your rough footage for next week’s show so that we can start producing promotional material and music score.” Dmitri worked his way across the room, going from chair seat to chair seat in a version of “the floor is lava.” He paused at the door once he was safely in the hallway. “You are not to leave this room until that snake is found and contained. And keep it away from Accounting.”

Snake wrangling was not one of Jane’s skills. Pittsburgh had a few poisonous snakes, most of them rattlesnakes and their Elfhome cousins. She’d never encountered any brightly colored ones but she wasn’t a naturalist. She joined Taggart on the table while Hal and Nigel looked for the snake. “Is it deadly, Hal?”

“Possibly.” Hal lapsed in to host mode. “There are sixty-five recognized species of coral snake on Earth. Those in North America have the most dangerous venom found on the continent. Their bite contains a powerful neurotoxin that paralyzes the breathing muscles — so they can be deadly. There are also multiple nonpoisonous species that mimic the coral snake’s coloration as protection from predators, such as the red milk snake. Coral snakes are quite reclusive and non-aggressive, so there are very few recorded bites on Earth. It tends to be a warmer clime breed but I’ve been hoping for one to show in Pittsburgh so we could compare the Elfhome species to Earth ones.”

“Whatever.” Jane shook her head. Naturalists! She was glad that she’d left Chesty at the motor pool, guarding her SUV. Her big elfhound would have insisted on joining the hunt. “Find the snake.”

She called Duff. “I’m clear. What’s up?”

“Yumiko tracked Alton down this morning to rake him over the coals: Hal’s name came up in an emergency meeting between Jin Wong and Tinker domi. Yumiko wanted to know about finding a box in pieces after a gunfight at the Carnegie.” Duff raised the pitch of his voice slightly to mimic Yumiko. “Why hadn’t yinz told the tengu about it?”

Jane doubted that Yumiko used the Pittsburgh slang of “yinz” for “you guys,” but the sentiment was probably correct.

Duff dropped his voice back to normal. “Alton called me since he didn’t know. What shoot-out at the museum? Does she mean Nigel’s baby-dragon box? Did you find that?”

Did Jane not tell her family about the shoot-out? It happened a week after July’s shutdown — back when Sparrow was still alive and second-in-command of the elves. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Two little girls — known to Nigel only as Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo — had somehow crashed a ritzy party in New York City to give Nigel a magical whistle. The girls weren’t alone; they had a baby dragon with them. Lemon-Lime told Nigel about a box filled with other baby dragons and then warned him that Sparrow was an oni double agent.

Jane hadn’t wanted to believe the information but Lemon-Lime had made a cartoon of Jane’s fight with a saurus — months before it happened. There was no denying that the whistle worked; Jane’s team used it on the namazu. Somehow these little girls on Earth were magical geniuses who knew the future.

What’s more, Jane had had an odd conversation with Tooloo. The elf talked about playing poker with children. Tooloo’s coded message seemed to be that Nigel and Taggart were “cards” being played by Lemon-Lime in a dangerous game against other people who could “see” the future. To seal the deal, “an anonymous female” called the EIA with wildly specific details of what was about to happen at the museum, and then, from halfway around the world, Queen Soulful Ember had gotten a message to the Wind Clan to intercede on behalf of Jane’s team. While it seemed to indicate that the queen’s oracle, Pure Radiance, and Tooloo were two “poker players” helping Jane’s team, the question became who else was playing? Normally you needed five to seven people to play the game correctly. Did Lemon-Lime count as one player or two? Did the oni have people who could see the future?

To protect Lemon-Lime, Nigel hadn’t told Yumiko about the box, only Jane and her family. He had already done some legwork on tracking the box: the official report on Earth was that the curator accompanying the museum pieces had vanished on Elfhome during the June Shutdown. Jane and her team had gone to the Carnegie just to double-check that the box hadn’t arrived after Startup. What they found was a horde of oni disguised as humans.

Jane thought that her family knew about the shoot-out at the museum. Hal had blown up part of the Hall of Architecture during the fight. It had been on the news — hadn’t it? Actually, now that she thought about, no reporters had shown up at the museum as Maynard had personally debriefed them. Windwolf had done something newsworthy while searching for his bride; all the local reporters had been in the South Hills covering the Viceroy. Maynard might have put a lid on the information because of the queen’s rare and odd intercession.

Jane glanced at Hal; he and Nigel were carefully peering under the credenza across the room. She lowered her voice and explained why the shoot-out slipped her mind. “That was the day that Hal found out about the wedding.”

“Ahhh.” Duff made sounds of understanding the problem. “You got distracted by Hal going ballistic.”

“Yup.” Jane explained to Duff in quiet tones how her team ended up in a fight at the museum. They were rescued from the oni via the arrival of the Elfhome Interdimensional Agency. They were then saved from being arrested for blowing up parts of the museum by a message from Queen Soul Ember. The short note — arriving via one of the holy sekasha warriors — reminded Director Derek Maynard that the treaty had made the museum property of the crown. “The queen gave us free run of the place. We found parts of the box in the woodshop but nothing of the baby dragons or the eggs that they were in. I didn’t consider it as ‘finding’ anything. All we managed to do was verify what we already suspected: Sparrow had gotten the box to her oni masters. We just put more dots on the line. I would have thought that the tengu spy network would have connected those dots before now.”

Duff laughed. “I got the impression that Yumiko knew about the shoot-out but bought whatever official statement you gave the EIA. Something about filming that scary-ass wyvern they got strung up?”

“Something like that.” Jane had lied so much that week that she’d lost track of everything she said. She would have stuck as close to the truth as possible. She probably did blame their presence on the wyvern. Nigel had been struck speechless by it.

“Yumiko let something slip,” Duff said. “Although I don’t think she’s connected all the dots. Lemon-Lime is in town.”

“What?” Jane snapped in surprise.

Duff explained that the emergency meeting with Tinker domi had been focused on the baby dragons inside the missing box. The female yamabushi had let slip that the tengu had learned of the box when some Nestlings and “other children” suddenly arrived from Earth with a tiny dragon named Joy. “Given how Yumiko talked about dragons in the past, the chances of being more than one tiny dragon teamed up with a bunch of kids seems unlikely.”

Tooloo had made it sound like the new player at the dangerous poker game had just arrived.

“Okay,” Jane said slowly. “That doesn’t change much. Yeah, we found the box but it was empty. The egg thingies inside were what was important. The trail went cold at the museum. We searched the whole place, top to bottom.”

“Maybe,” Duff said. Jane could hear him typing on a keyboard. “The Carnegie runs on human tech, not oni magic. I’m going try to get people in to see if there’s any computers still have any stray usable information on them.”

Jane doubted it. They’d gone through the director’s office and the woman — oni — whatever — had been a sticky-note kind of person. There was a rainbow of little squares littering every surface, all with cryptic comments. They’d taken pictures of everything and pored over the notes later. They hadn’t found anything that suggested where the box’s contents had been moved to. “Give it a whirl.”

“Will do,” Duff said.

“Is that it?” Jane prepared to hang up.

“You’re going to want to call Mom,” Duff said. “She’s on the warpath about something. Bye!”

Taggart must have overheard that part as he nodded and murmured, “We lost the band.”

“Oh no! Why?” Jane cried. Carl Moser had been best friends with her younger brother Geoffrey all through elementary and high school. He’d started an elf fusion-rock band with a mix of human and elf artists and set up an enclave-styled commune in the Strip District. Unbeknownst to her mother and other brothers, Geoffrey had been dating the band’s male elf drummer, but that was a whole other kettle of fish. Jane had picked Moser’s band to play at her wedding because she could trust him and his band mates to keep their mouths shut if any of the family’s dangerous secrets — tengu involvement, resistance leadership, rescued baby sister, yadayadayada — slipped out during the wedding. Replacing Moser’s band would be a matter more complicated than just finding a group of people who could play instruments together.

“We locked them in months ago!” Jane cried. “Oh, Moser is dead meat if he pulls out on my mom.”

Taggart shrugged in ignorance or acceptance of Moser’s fate.

Jane growled with frustration. She hated being the center of attention as it usually meant that she had lost control of a life-or-death situation.

If Jane had had her way, she would have married Taggart in July. Pittsburgh kept the Pennsylvanian law that required a three-day waiting period. They could have gone to the Frick Building on Grant Street and gotten married at the weirdly named Orphans’ Court. She and Taggart had to go there to apply for the marriage license anyhow.

But her mother had spent twenty-six years dreaming of a huge blowout wedding for her daughter. Her mother wanted all the bells and whistles. The fancy wedding invitations on linen paper, engraved with charcoal ink, with a square of tissue to protect the type. The calligraphy addresses printed by hand on the outer envelopes. The white dress with the full train (ordered for her mother’s wedding but never used and carefully kept in tissue paper for the day that Jane could wear it.) A full church service. An elaborate reception with tons of flowers and cookies and booze and a live band. Jane hated the whole thing because she would be center stage from the moment she walked down the aisle to the first dance.

She needed to live with her mother, though, so she had compromised on a small wedding held on the last weekend before Taggart’s visa expired. The fact that they had little more than two months to plan the wedding made it seem as if they could skip many of the embarrassing bells and whistles.

Life had other plans.

Things started to go wrong immediately. Another couple had already claimed the Kryskill family’s church for that date. Jane suggested that they just have the ceremony at Hyeholde, seamlessly going from wedding to reception, but her mother insisted on a church. After days of frantic searching, her mother begged her way into a Russian Orthodox church. The onion-domed cathedral sat in an abandoned section of Homestead, ironically not far from Sandcastle Water Park.

The ceremony location finally secured, they could have the invitations printed. The printing company that her family normally used had had a car dropped on it during the Veterans Bridge shoot-out in June. Their fallback printer seemed to have a death wish, dragging out the normal hour-long decision process into a week of back-and-forth phone calls. It didn’t have cardstock for Jane’s first three choices — but it took an entire day to verify that for each selection. After Jane had picked out a fourth choice, the printer kept putting holds on the print run as they checked and rechecked that they were spelling everyone’s name correctly. (Any company with the name of Kolodziejski Kwikie Print shouldn’t complain about Aheahe, Elikapeka, and Keaweaheulu Ka’ihikapu Taggart.) Jane had been seriously worried her mother would firebomb the company and start over with a new printer.

Then Tinker domi dropped an orbital gate on Jane’s wedding plans. The entire visa problem for both Taggart and Nigel had been instantly rendered moot. At that point it seemed saner to just push back the date of the wedding to when the Kryskill family church was free.

Jane had regretted the choice since the moment she agreed to it. It had given her mother more time to get more extravagant and more time for things to go wrong.

“There! See? In that crack?” Hal lay on the floor, shining his phone’s flashlight under the credenza.

“Oh, yes, there’s my beauty.” Nigel was in a slightly more cautious pose but right there beside Hal in terms of danger.

Much as Jane didn’t want to talk to her mother, she couldn’t in good conscience leave the conference room until the snake was caught. “Do not get bit!” she ordered the two naturalists as she dialed her mother’s phone number.

“Jane!” Her mother answered the phone with the joy generated by the planning one of her children’s massive flashy wedding.

“I just got off the phone with Duff. He said you wanted to talk to me…?”

“Elliot is trying not to let it show, but Elliot is really feeling blue about being left out of the wedding. I had a thought, if we double up the wedding party size, no one will notice one or two stray people.”

Jane had been braced for a rant against Carl Moser. “What? Who is Elli…Oh!”

The oni warlord, Kajo, had kidnapped Jane’s baby sister, Carla Marie — generally called Boo by everyone — and transformed her into a tengu of the Chosen bloodline. He planned to use her as a tool to control the tengu Flock. It was only by luck and daring that Jane managed to finally find and rescue Boo in July. They’d kept Boo secret from everyone — even extended family — in fear that Kajo might try to steal Boo back.

Duff created daily code words for the family to use when discussing Boo, just in case the oni were monitoring their cell phones. “Elliot” was today’s codeword for Boo.

In July and most of August, it had been unthinkable that Boo could be involved in the wedding as the tengu had been still enslaved by the oni. Tinker domi, however, had performed miracles and now it might be safe for Boo to attend the wedding. The place was going to be crawling with good-looking blond people once you counted all Jane’s aunts, cousins, and kids. Could Boo be part of the wedding party? Center stage of the entire long ceremony? Jane had serious doubts.

Her mother obviously hoped that if Jane’s wedding party was larger, they could slip Boo into the mix without anyone noticing. “You have your uncle standing in for your father, but it’s not right to leave your siblings out of the most important day of your life. You have five brothers. They should be part of the wedding party. And what about Hal? His nose is already out of joint over you picking Taggart over him.”

If they added Hal and her five brothers on top of Taggart and Nigel as his best man, the male side of the wedding party would jump to eight. Sixteen people. Good God, what a circus.

Jane wanted to say no but she didn’t want to hurt Boo’s feelings. “Mom, the wedding is in two weeks!”

Her mom plowed on. “We’re already renting tuxedoes for your brothers. I’ve got enough of that dusty rose fabric to make six more dresses. I’ve lined up a team of dressmakers. I’ve talked to Julia, Cora, and Ina already and they’ve said yes. That will give us six counting you and Brandy. We just need two more women — preferably ones that your cousins don’t know. As soon as possible.”

“What about Rachel?” Jane asked since her mom had only named three of her four first cousins.

“Rachel is in Mercy Hospital with preeclampsia.” Her mother used the tone of voice that indicated that her mom believed she had told Jane this more than once. She might have or she might have emailed Taggart and he hadn’t passed the information on yet. Jane had been tuning out the wedding stuff. “She might be having the baby on the day of the wedding. I really hope not, I want all of my sisters to be there. I’m going to need them for damage control.”

“Okay. Rachel is a no-go. Wait.” The numbers didn’t add up. They would need six women to balance her five brothers and Hal. Her mother had only recruited three of her cousins. “Don’t I need three more?”

“Elliot and two others.”

“Oh, yes. Okay.” Boo would be one of the three girls. Two would still be impossible. Jane’s father had died when she was twelve, just days after Boo was born. It left Jane as a semi-parent to her five younger brothers. It had also made her impatient with typical high school drama. She knew what real-life problems looked like. It wasn’t getting a date to the dance but trying to cope with a two-year-old who was grieving for his dead father at three a.m.

Her attitude hadn’t made her popular in high school. Her friends were mostly girls like Brandy Lyn Pomeroy-Brooks-Abernethy who had their own life problems that gave them similar outlooks. Others like Cesia Cwiklinski…Jane was never sure why she was friends with Cesia beyond the rule of opposites attract.

“Mom! I already asked Brandy to be my maid of honor. CC is pissed off that I didn’t ask her. She says we made some weird vow back in junior high school to be each other’s maid of honor. I don’t remember it. Frankly, I think she’s confusing me with someone else. I’m fairly sure I never thought about wedding parties until July. Whatever — Cesia isn’t talking to me. Brandy will not give up the spot either, not to CC. You know how competitive they are with each other.”

“What about what’s-her-name? You and Brandy and CC went to the prom together with her? I still can’t believe that all the boys in your class were too afraid of the four of you to ask any of you out.”

“Mel? She moved Stateside! Most of the girls in my class went off to college and didn’t come back. I don’t know any other women! I’ve been too busy since high school doing Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden to make new friends. The wedding is in two weeks! Who wants to go to a stranger’s wedding with that short a notice?”

“Oh, Jane, don’t be so dramatic. We’re talking about half of the population of the city. Surely you know someone who will bite the bullet for you. Just find two more women that your cousins won’t know and we can trust. Ask them to be your bridesmaids. We can slip Elliot in opposite to Guy and no one will question it.”

Like hell people wouldn’t! They hadn’t told anyone in their extended family that Jane had found Boo. The minute her cousins saw Boo, though, they would recognize her. Boo was a young woman instead of a child, but she had the same halo of curly white-blond hair. Jane was going to have to tell her cousin Roach since he’d spent most of the summer putting his neck on the line for her. Roach had loaned her use of his boat, volunteered to run the merchandise end of Hal’s Heroes, and was currently babysitting a crate of dynamite.

“Open up, let me see what you have in your mouth,” Hal murmured quietly. He was kneeling beside the credenza with a small striped snake in hand. The “wee thing” looked only slightly bigger than a ballpoint pen. “Winner, winner, chicken dinner!”

In Hal-talk, it meant that the snake was venomous.

“Hal!” Jane snapped. “Get that into some kind of cage!”

The naturalists set off in search of a secure container, snake in hand.

“What does he have?” her mother asked.

“A cute deadly snake that Nigel carried into the building in his pants pocket.” Jane snapped her fingers and indicated that Taggart should follow. The collective common sense of the naturalists was about on par with a five-year-old.

Her mother sighed. “Boys and their trouser snakes.”

“Mom!” What was she saying to her mother? “I don’t have a lot of friends. I’ve really focused on my job for the last eight years.”

“Which was not entirely a good thing,” her mother said. “I’m sure, though, you have more friends than you realize. Just ask some of the girls at WQED. You’ll need to hurry, though, we only have a few days to get their dresses made. Call me with their dress sizes.”

Her mother said goodbye and hung up while Jane was trying to figure out some sane answer.

There were certain things that Jane knew was fact. Her mother had spent twenty-six years dreaming of Jane’s wedding. Having been married shortly before her own husband was shipped off to war, her mother didn’t see the oni menace as an excuse not to celebrate the day. She would move hell and high water to make sure it was perfect. She would not be stopped. Anyone who got in her way would pay dearly.

To keep peace in the family, Jane needed to call her cousins and let them know the truth. But first, she needed to find two women she could trust not to betray her family’s secrets.

There were plenty of women at WQED. In theory, Jane knew everyone who worked for the station. She’d started as a production assistant eight years ago. She could walk through the building and name all her female coworkers. Courtney. Stephanie. Chelsea. Jasmine. Virginia. A score more.

She really didn’t know them, though. Most of her time was out in the field, with Hal and a camera. She came to the building to have their truck serviced by the motor pool, drop paperwork with Accounting, update legal (when Hal set something or someone on fire — which happened much more often than one imagined), and monitor postproduction work.

Hal got dangerous when he was bored and anything that didn’t put him in a spotlight bored him, which was why Jane and Hal rarely worked in the offices. They didn’t even have permanent desks. Jane did her paperwork at home or in the production truck or at any flat surface not currently being used at the station — hence the reason that her team camped out in the old Mr. Rogers studio from time to time.

She had always been a bit of an outsider at the station. She was a local. She was younger than most of the women — taller — louder — more prone to violence — heavily armed…

Frankly, she scared all of her coworkers.

Most of the women at the station had come to Elfhome from Earth. They were highly educated, idealistic, and inexperienced in violence. Jane would roll in from the field — often covered in blood — and usually angry enough to beat something or someone to death. A monster. Hal. A local government official. All of the above.

And then there was how she got her job…

Her family had three passions: cooking, guns, and cameras. It wasn’t a family outing without all three. She got her first camera when she was ten at a cookout at the family’s shooting range. Her grandfather patiently explained framing a picture and composition.

“It’s just like a gun,” he said since she been shooting rifles since she was six. “You want whatever you target in the crosshairs so it stays in focus. Keep the camera steady. Don’t jerk about but smoothly follow the target as it moves.”

Her grandfather had been to Africa to take pictures of animals she had only seen in The Lion King.

“You kill only to live,” he told her. “Be it an animal or another human being. Life is a sacred thing. Recording life is a way to honor it.”

Up to Boo’s disappearance, Jane had been torn between callings. She liked to cook but she wasn’t sure she wanted to make it a career. She loved the camera, but it didn’t seem possible to make a living with it in Pittsburgh. She’d taken enough pictures of her family to know that she didn’t have the patience for a lifetime of baby photos, high school senior pictures, or weddings. Sooner or later she would snap. The Pittsburgh television stations all required their camera operators to have a four-year degree in broadcasting, something that the University of Pittsburgh no longer offered.

Her family didn’t have the money to pay for an off-world school. Her grades were good but not good enough for a full scholarship to a college on Earth. With her skill in martial arts and with a rifle, she could have gone into the military. She couldn’t imagine the military ignoring her sharpshooting skills to let her pursue a career in photography. She had been afraid that she would get pressured to become a sniper like her father. It was a career that was useful only on the front line and had gotten her father killed.

Everything had changed when Boo vanished. Jane couldn’t leave Elfhome without feeling like she’d abandoned all hope for her baby sister. She couldn’t walk away from her little brothers, who had lost yet another family member. She couldn’t turn her back on her widowed mother, who had lost her baby.

The days following Boo’s disappearance in the Strip District during Shutdown, the Kryskills had become the big news story. The crews from all three television networks became intertwined with the Kryskills’ daily lives as the search for Boo dragged on and on. Because her brothers were minors, no one was allowed to interview them. Chloe Polanski turned public opinion against Jane’s mother, so the other networks focused on Jane.

It was probably the source of Jane’s uneasiness about being the center of attention. Certainly, it was the first time in her life that someone had turned a video camera on her. All the interviews, though, only made Jane aware of how badly she had failed at protecting her baby sister. She was only in the spotlight because she had screwed up. No one would be paying attention to Jane if she hadn’t lost her sister first.

Mark Webster had been WQED’s reporter; he’d been the one who suggested that Jane try for a job with his station. Later, Jane realized that he’d been flirting with her. He’d meant a temporary job at the front desk since the receptionist was going on maternity leave shortly, but by then Jane had filled out an application citing any camera experience that she could claim, including one Christmas working a Santa photo op booth. Nor was she completely sure what position WQED intended to interview her for — they gave her only a date and time.

She was sitting in the building’s lobby, waiting to be called back for her interview, when a drunk stumbled through the front door with a gun. Without thinking, she disarmed the gunman and pinned him to the floor. It wasn’t hard. He was a little man, reeking of whiskey and smelling like he’d slept in his rumbled clothes for at least two days in a row.

“Do you know who I am?” the drunk had cried as he squirmed helplessly.

“No,” Jane glanced at the very pregnant receptionist who was standing, staring openmouthed at her. “Call the police.”

“He — he works here,” the receptionist said as if she wasn’t sure which of them scared her more.

“I am Hal Rogers!” the drunk roared. “I’m the star of the Emmy-winning program Backyard Rehab! I–I—I think I’m going to be sick.”

Jane got Hal up and to the men’s bathroom before he could vomit on the carpet. By then she realized that she could get arrested for assault and possibly exiled from Elfhome, never mind not getting hired. She considered drowning Hal in the toilet. She probably would have if he hadn’t started to cry.

“I thought I could do something important here,” he sobbed. “Be someone more than some glorified gardener. A whole world to explore and I’m talking about growing flowers. Marigolds! Pansies! God, anyone can grow pansies! You could throw the seeds on the ground and they would grow. That’s how it works in nature. Seeds are meant to survive haphazard treatment.”

Jane didn’t know what to do. She paced the bathroom as Hal sat on the floor of the stall and wept.

Jane had no idea who Dmitri was when he swept into the bathroom but he had that “I am the king, this is my castle, you’re trespassing” kind of air about him.

“He had a pistol that he was waving around,” Jane said before Hal could accuse her of assault. She was fairly sure that the receptionist had ratted her out to the king and perhaps the police. Jane took out Hal’s pistol and sat it on the ledge under the bathroom’s mirror. “I didn’t recognize him.” She put the magazine beside the gun to show it wasn’t loaded anymore and then added, “There’s no bullet in the chamber. I checked.”

At the time, she was amazed that her explanation had been enough to turn Dmitri’s attention to Hal. Once she got to know the two men better, it wasn’t surprising at all.

“Why do you have a gun, Hal?” Dmitri asked in the quiet, intimidating manner that Jane would get to know well.

“Because every freaking thing on this planet wants to eat me!” Hal flailed his hand. “It’s not just the animals. I could deal with it if it was just the animals! But the plants and the trees! The trees! The trees!”

Dmitri sighed and focused on Jane. “You’re my ten o’clock interview. You’re the older sister of the little lost girl.”

Was that a question? Jane wasn’t sure. She decided to treat it as such. “Yes.”

Dmitri’s eyes narrowed. “Family is military. Father is deceased. You’ve got five younger brothers.”

“Yes,” Jane said.

“Fine,” Dmitri said. “You’re hired. Get him sober, cleaned up, and back to filming.”

“What?” both Jane and Hal said.

“You’re the new PA for his show,” Dmitri said.

“New what?” Jane had no idea what a PA was.

“Production assistant,” Dmitri said. “It means you do whatever is needed to be done to make sure the show is filmed on time for its timeslot, which is in four days.”

“Wait!” Hal cried. “What about — what’s his name? John? Jack? J-J-Jarrold?”

“Jarrold was the PA you ran over,” Dmitri said. “John is the one you set on fire yesterday.”

“Oh, well, he shouldn’t have been standing so close to me when I had a flamethrower.”

“John was twenty feet from you; he’d been warned.”

“I’m sure he’ll be up and about in no time,” Hal said. “I had a fire extinguisher ready…”

“John quit. Jarrold quit and left the planet.” Dmitri pointed at Jane. “Stop at HR and get insurance forms.”

Hired or not, Jane was still angry, although she wasn’t sure at whom. Hal for being drunk and waving around a gun? Dmitri for hiring her for a position that seemed like a glorified babysitting job? She wasn’t sure she wanted that job. She wanted to be a camera operator.

She took being hired as permission to do what she wanted to Hal Rogers. If they fired her, so be it. After getting the paperwork signed in Human Resources, she bullied Hal into taking her to his place.

He lived a few blocks away at one of the few hi-rise luxury condos in Oakland. It should have been a nice place to live as he had a sprawling penthouse apartment with big windows that showed off the city gloriously. Said windows had no drapes or blinds, just some cheap curtain rods left by the previous tenant. A small mountain of moving boxes filled most of the living room. There was a mattress thrown on the floor of the master bedroom. A second mountain of boxes filled the tiny spare bedroom. The only things unpacked were his clothes, some biology books, and his doctorate degree. He’d obviously arrived on Elfhome with high hopes and gotten lost somewhere along the way. The parts of the apartment not filled with moving boxes were littered with bachelor trash: empty food containers, dirty dishes, and empty whiskey bottles.

At that point, Jane became angry at her new coworkers. Hal was one of them — for better or worse. Why hadn’t they helped him settle into his new home? Get some curtains up, unpacked the boxes, and found him a real bed? How could you turn your back on someone who was totally and utterly alone on a new world? Who obviously was struggling?

Hal needed help but Jane didn’t have time to get his life in order while making sure the show hit its deadline. She called her older cousin, Rachel, who ran a service company for people new to Pittsburgh. It was a combination of native guide and maid service and personal chef.

“I’ll leave the place unlocked,” Jane told her cousin. She picked up Hal’s wallet and took out all his cash. “Give the apartment the works. Laundry. Trash removal. A good scrub. And he needs furniture too. Talk to your guy at Once Upon A Mattress; see if you can get him to deliver a starter set.”

“One bed, nightstand, love seat, dinette table, and a chair?”

“He has a mattress, so just the bedframe.”

Rachel gave her a price for the works. Jane counted out the necessary bills and put them in the freezer as she gave directions to the apartment. “I put the money under the ice tray. Lock up when you’re done.”

It wouldn’t solve all of Hal’s problems but it would be a step in the right direction. Jane made a list of things that the man obviously needed. A coffeemaker. Dishes. Glasses. Silverware. Some real food. How did someone end up with so many condiments in his refrigerator and nothing to use them on?

Hal came out of his bedroom in cleaner clothes and a great deal more sober. “What was your name?”

“Jane,” she said. She offered her hand like her father had taught her. “Jane Kryskill.”

“Hal Rogers.” He shook her hand, still peering at her as if through a fog. “How old are you? Sixteen?”

“Eighteen. Come on, let’s go.”

“Go? Where?”

“We have a show to film,” she said.

“I’m not sure you understand how this works,” Hal said. “I’m the show’s star. You are the show’s PA. You follow my orders. I do not follow yours.”

She stepped close to take advantage of her height and used the cold, serious voice that her mother used so well to control her brothers. “I am responsible for making sure that the show is delivered on time. You will do what I say or I will hogtie you and carry you back to the station on my shoulder. Do I make myself clear?”

He worked his mouth for a moment (later she would realize how rare it would be for him to be shocked speechless) and then meekly said, “Yes, madam.”

It turned out that setting the last PA on fire effectively had stopped all filming on the show. The show’s producer was a nervous man from Stateside with an odd accent and odder expectations. Somehow, he thought that he didn’t have to walk three steps to get a coffee but instead expected Jane to drop everything to get it for him. She disabused him of that notion within an hour. This triggered the director calling Dmitri, which resulted in the phone being handed to Jane.

“Kryskill, be nice to the man,” Dmitri said over the phone. “Your producer is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If he wants to pull stupid power plays, go along with it as far as it doesn’t infringe on you keeping Rogers in check. You understand?”

“So, I’m to play ‘Simon says’ with this idiot?”

“Think of him as a prissy drill sergeant. He doesn’t want coffee, he wants obedience. You’re his soldier. Do what he tells you.”

“Yes, sir.”

She fetched coffee, scripts, light reflectors, and various other odd little bits while keeping an eye on Hal. After babysitting six younger siblings all her life, it was actually an easy thing to do. When Hal produced the flamethrower to finish out the segment, she quietly fetched the fire extinguisher. Thus, Hal and said producer’s script only burned for a minute before being put out. (The petty little man was wise enough to dodge when the flamethrower swept the column of flame at him.)

While the producer went off to complain to Dmitri, Jane took Hal to the hospital for treatment. Afterward, she took him home.

“That wasn’t necessary,” Hal said as she made sure he got to his apartment. “I can deal with burns. I have a doctorate in biology. I can bandage my own wounds.”

Jane was at the end of her patience. She considered ripping off the bandages and letting him reapply them like he wanted.

Hal unlocked his apartment door, swung it open. “Shit! I’ve been robbed. No. No. Not robbed. Cleaned! I’ve been cleaned! What the hell? Where did this love seat come from? I have a bed! A real bed with clean sheets! Oh! Oh! You’re an angel!”

“The station manager…”

“Dmitri.”

She realized that she had never gotten her boss’s name. “Yes, Dmitri, the station manager, he told me to take care of you. You seem to really need someone on your side. I mean, you’re all alone here, aren’t you?”

His eyes widened and then some pure emotion filled his face. Sorrow. Regret. She didn’t know the man enough to read it but she could tell it was raw and powerful. Then he banished it away with, “Yes, I wanted a fresh new start on a new world. It’s — it’s been harder than I thought it would be. God, I need a drink.”

“I think you’ve had enough to drink.” She blocked his move toward the bottles of alcohol that Rachel had collected together on a side counter as if it were some kind of minibar. “Look, as far as I can tell, Dmitri has given you a lot of rope. All you’ve done is hang yourself with it. Why don’t you actually do something useful with all that freedom?”

“Like what?”

“People don’t use flamethrowers on weeds here. They use them on steel spinners. You can’t get a clear shot at the spiders because of their webbing, so you’ve got to burn your way through the nests. People like you — the people who are new to Elfhome — don’t know that. A lot of them just ignore the nests, thinking that the spiders never leave them. They don’t realize one spinner egg sack contains a thousand babies that scatter on the wind. If more people burned out nests when they found them, there’d be fewer spiders all over the city. We could get ahead of the problem if everyone was focused on it.”

He was nodding. “Yes! Yes! That’s what I wanted to do when I came here!” He surprised her and flung his arms around her in a tight hug. Unfortunately, it landed his face in her chest. “Oh, sorry.”

He drifted away from her, embarrassed and uncertain. “So, you’re eighteen, huh? You seem a lot older. I guess part of it is that you’re tall and…umm…not starry-eyed. But yes, I want to do something important. Something that changes lives. Not distributing horticultural morsels to the unwashed masses.”

Jane nodded as she parsed the last bit. She’d never actually heard anyone use those words aloud. “I figure that we wrap up this week’s show, get it on the air, and then do the next show on steel spinners.”

“Yes!” Hal rubbed his hands together. “We have the flamethrower. We just need a nest and a script.”

“We can write the script.” Jane figured that it couldn’t be too hard. She had gotten an A-minus in AP English. “We just need to walk people through the basics. How to recognize nests before you walk into them. How to clean them out. Yadayadayada.”

She sifted through the boxes until she found a box marked Kitchen. She took out her knife and cut it open. There was a large, mysterious, paper-wrapped bundle in the box that smelled horrible. She unwrapped it to find a trash can still holding rotting garage. “What the hell?”

Hal shook his head and began to tear packing tape off the other boxes. “I had the movers pack up my place in Los Angeles. Faster. Less painful. At least in theory. The station footed the bill. The movers were weirdly inefficient; I suspect because they were paid by the box.”

“Okay.” She put down the trash can and filled the empty box with bottles of alcohol.

“What are you doing?” Hal asked.

“Today is the first day of your new life,” she said. “I have nothing against drinking. My family were moonshiners during the Prohibition. But when you show up at work, drunk and waving a gun, it’s time to go cold turkey.”

“No, no, no, no.” He started to reach for the bottles.

She stopped him with a cold look. “You will listen to me or I will hurt you.”

He flinched back. “Do you know how expensive a good bottle of scotch is?”

She eyed the bottle that he tried to take out of the box. “Old Crow?”

“That’s a whiskey and it’s not expensive, but some of my scotches are a hundred dollars a bottle.”

“I might be eighteen but there’s very little about alcohol that I don’t know. It’s part of my family business to know. If you had anything worth that much, you’d have drunk it all. You can have this.” She pulled out what she judged the best of the scotch that he owned. It was also the bottle with the least amount of liquid still left in it. “I’ll give it back a bottle at a time.”

“You are not in charge of me.”

“Yes, I am.”

“That’s not how all this works.”

“It is now.”

They stared at each other in silence. She wasn’t sure what his life was like up to this moment, but she had had staring contests like this with her brothers since she was four. You drew the line in the sand and stood your ground until the other person caved.

His anger slowly gave way to bewilderment and then something like hope. “You’re really going to take care of me?”

“Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow at the station. I’ve made a key to your apartment. If you don’t show up, I’ll come get you. I will not be gentle. If I were you, I’d be at the station at eight-thirty.”

“Right,” he said slowly and then smiled.

“Good night, Hal.”

“Good night, Jane.”

It had taken a year to dry Hal out, as any little setback had him crawling back into any bottle he managed to hide from Jane. It had taken another year of chewing through Earth-trained producers until Jane learned how to do their job. It was a crazy two years total. Between her first day and the following seven hundred days of fighting with Hal, producers, and Dmitri, she hadn’t left the best impression on her coworkers.

The next six years after that rocky start had repaired her image a little. Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden became the station’s top show. Hal had gone from unknown to local icon. Jane learned the names of all the other coworkers and was friendly with them, but none of them were, strictly speaking, friends.

Nor was Jane particularly close to any of them. For example, she had totally missed the fact that Ginnilee Berger, who normally handled housing for new hires and interns, had gotten pregnant and returned to Earth in June due to the pregnancy being high-risk. As far as Jane was concerned, the woman had suddenly vanished without explanation — at least, until someone explained her disappearance to Jane in July. Jane couldn’t say that she knew any employee any better than she had known Ginnilee.

Her coworkers were aware, however, that Jane was getting married, the rush nature of the wedding, and the possibility that Hal would be Hal. If Jane found two women she could trust, at least she wouldn’t have to explain the basics to them. She could also — in theory — raid their personnel files prior to asking them.

Jane started in Legal, as it was the smallest department and both employees were female.

The station’s lawyer, Virginia Jijon-Caamano, could be considered her friend; certainly they had fought battles together to clean up Hal’s messes. They shared “tall blonde” fist bumps when Virginia got Hal out of trouble — again. Jane was fairly sure that Virginia had been the one who told Dmitri about Jane getting married. Someone in Legal had because they were worried that Taggart was taking advantage of her. It fit into Virginia’s MO of seeing her coworkers as extended family. Although, Dmitri had added that Jane scared Legal. Jane was fairly sure that the only thing that scared Virginia was her kids getting bad grades.

“Jane!” Virginia greeted her with a warm smile. She was immaculately dressed as always in a freshly ironed white button-down blouse, a short black skirt that showed off her long legs, and a set of heels that closed her two-inch height difference with Jane. “What did Hal do now?”

“Hopefully, nothing, but it’s been a few minutes since I last saw him.” Jane paused and listened. No screaming. That was a good sign that the snake had been safely contained.

Virginia laughed, focusing back on what she had been doing, which was swapping out photographs of her children. They jumped forward in age by at least three or four years even as Jane looked on. The elementary school little kids became tall high school students. The last photograph was a group shot where Virginia’s two girls were as tall as their mother and her son towered over her by a full head.

“Wow, your kids grew up fast,” Jane said as she mentally adjusted Virginia’s age. She thought of the woman as “only slightly older than me” but obviously Virginia was closer to Jane’s mother’s age. “They were just little things when I started.”

Virginia laughed. “Yes, my husband and I had started the ‘where do we want to retire’ discussion. It’s all moot now.”

“You weren’t staying on Elfhome?” Jane asked with surprise.

“We couldn’t stay. We’re both on work visas. Once we retired, we would lose our visas. None of our children were born here. Once we retired, like it or not, the entire family would need to leave.”

Jane wanted to say that it was terrible to be forced to leave the only home that the children probably remembered. If Virginia’s kids were like Jane’s classmates, though, having both a home and a good job usually wasn’t possible in Pittsburgh. Jobs that required advanced degrees went to the best qualified, which were the people who went to Earth’s finest schools. Those were colleges that kids from Pittsburgh rarely could attend for various reasons, starting with money, but it boiled down to the fact that Pittsburgh simply didn’t have the resources to maintain a world-class high school.

“How can I help you today?” Virginia asked.

Jane’s mother might say “any woman” but Jane knew that her mother wouldn’t want a stranger as old as herself as part of the wedding party. The unspoken criteria included young, tall, and photogenic. Her mother might dream of possible daughter-in-law candidates as part of the mix but Jane wasn’t about to go down that road.

“I wanted to double-check,” Jane lied only slightly. “After the wedding, Taggart doesn’t need anything beyond his visa and the wedding license to finalize his citizenship with the EIA?”

“Yes. I’ve triple-checked for you, even though that’s all moot for now. If Taggart has any problems at all, he’s to call me. I’ll come down and mow through the red tape. They weeded out all the oni moles that made that department hell to work with, but the people left are all kind of clueless.”

Jane glanced into the cubbyhole office that belonged to Virginia’s paralegal assistant, Makayla Friedman. The girl was in her early twenties, reasonably tall, photogenic, and a fashion horse; Jane had never seen the girl in the same outfit twice. Makayla would be able to hold her own, surrounded by Jane and her statuesque family. Jane considered the girl annoyingly perky but she was good at keeping secrets. Her office, however, was empty. “Where is Makayla?”

Virginia sighed. “She’s probably in the restroom, fixing her makeup again.”

“Again?” Jane echoed. She had never seen the girl fiddle with her makeup while they were grinding through one of Hal’s messes; Makayla always looked so flawless that she seemed unreal.

Virginia pursed her lips, considering what to tell Jane before admitting, “Makayla’s not taking things well since the gate failed and stranded her in Pittsburgh. She had ambitions that this office was just a stepping-stone for her. It’s difficult to pour your life into one direction and suddenly — through events that you couldn’t possibly control — lose all of it. She’s spending her breaks in the restroom, crying as quietly as she can. Poor girl. She ends up looking like a raccoon. I suggested that she stop wearing so much eye makeup but she says putting it on calms her.”

What came out of the restroom was a far cry from perky. Makayla was holding a tissue to her nose as if it was still dripping. She hadn’t gotten all of the ruined mascara cleaned off; there was a faint dark mask around her eyes, which were red and moist with tears.

“Damn cheap drugstore makeup,” Makayla growled in greeting. “I was supposed to get an order of Urban Decay in August.”

Jane was fairly sure that the paralegal was talking about makeup, not the parts of Pittsburgh that were in disrepair. Urban Decay seemed an odd name for cosmetics. Jane wasn’t sure what to say in response — which was the normal problem she had with women that worked at WQED. They might be her gender but they came from another world. They’d been to college, flown in airplanes, seen mountains, oceans, and the great lakes. Most of them had never fired a gun, killed an animal, or seen a walking tree. The lack of common ground kept most conversations focused on work.

Makayla wore what was cutting fashion for Earth: a bold, pink paisley sleeveless blouse, a white pencil-skirt that could nearly classify as a miniskirt, and clunky, thick-soled platform shoes. It was stylish and good looking (except for the shoes, in Jane’s opinion) but anyone could identify Makayla at a glance as someone who hadn’t been born in Pittsburgh. It always made Jane feel slightly underdressed when she was at the office, even when she tried dressing up for a production meeting, like she was now.

Makayla clunked past Jane, heading for her desk. “I’m running out of everything! I used up my Kona coffee, my boba tea supplies, and my Dr. Jart cryo rubber face masks. I’m down to my last six-pack of San Pellegrino. My parents were supposed to mail me a care package last Shutdown for my — my — my birthday!” She covered her face with her carefully manicured hands. “My mother wanted me to come home for the summer! Now I’m never going to see my family ever again!”

“I doubt that very much,” Virginia said calmly. “WTAE reported that Princess Tinker had the EIA clear the Squirrel Hill Tunnel for her so she could build a land-based gate inside of them.”

“Chloe Polanski made that up!” Makayla wailed. “Polanski was an oni mole! Hannah called me in hysterics from WTAE’s legal department. She wanted to know if we had any job openings; she’s desperate to jump ship. Polanski lied about everything: she gave their HR a fake home address and emergency contact information. All the photos of ‘her family’ are off of Shutterstock. The EIA searched her desk and found it booby-trapped with enough C4 to take out the entire floor. HR is pointing fingers at Hannah’s department, saying that they thought Legal did a background check when they did Polanski’s visa paperwork. Hannah wasn’t even out of high school when that happened. When you go back and review Polanski’s news stories from this summer, you can see she planted misinformation all over the place. Who was behind Windwolf’s disappearance. What killed his bodyguard. How the shoot-out on Veterans Bridge started. Where the oni might be holding Princess Tinker. The Squirrel Hill Tunnel was just more of the same: the vicereine never talked about why she was at the tunnel during the interview; Polanski tacked that on afterward in her summation. No one questions a field reporter making educated guess; it’s assumed that time will tell if they’re right or wrong.”

Jane snorted. Chloe Polanski had made “educated guesses” about Jane’s mother on the air, making it seem Boo had run away from an abusive home. The woman would have known that Kajo had taken Boo. Polanski’s smear of Jane’s mother was simply a way to keep people from thinking about possible kidnappers.

“Everyone at WTAE is afraid that the elves are going to show up and behead everyone at the station.” Makayla reached for her box of tissues.

“They let her walk all over people right and left,” Jane said. “They had to know that sooner or later, she’d piss off the elves.”

“You’re one to talk, missy,” Virginia murmured as Makayla loudly blew her nose. “Hal was plowing through people even before the conflict started. You’ve only gotten worse since nature boy number two showed up.”

Virginia meant Nigel, who most of WQED saw as being the same make and model as Hal. Nigel might be as heedless of his own danger but he was much more cautious of other people’s safety. It had been the discovery that the oni had been behind Boo’s disappearance that made Jane’s team’s behavioral pattern “worse,” not Nigel.

Just like Chloe Polanski, if things went south with Jane’s team, everyone at WQED would bear the weight of suspicion.

“I’m sorry,” Jane whispered.

“We’ve got your back,” Virginia answered. “But please, be careful.”

Jane nodded.

Virginia focused her attention back to her bawling paralegal. “Polanski might have lied about why Princess Tinker was at the Squirrel Hill tunnels, but the vicereine did make a gate that opened to Onihida. If she can make one, she can make another.”

Jane knew for a fact that the EIA had cleared the tunnels in expectation that Tinker would use them to reconnect Pittsburgh to Earth. After the museum shoot-out, Director Maynard seemed to see Jane’s team as a trustworthy pest-removal unit. He’d called them several times that summer to deal with Elfhome’s deadlier flora and fauna. Jane had helped clear the tunnels of steel spinner nests while Taggart worked cameras. They hadn’t used the footage yet because the powers that be — Tinker, Maynard, and Jin Wong — weren’t sure that Tinker should attempt to build a gate. At least, not until the elves won the war against the oni. If Tinker accidently linked her gate to Onihida instead of Earth, the army that the oni had amassed could push through her gate before she could shut it down. The general consensus was that Tinker domi should wait until the elves could spare the firepower to deal with an incoming army.

It was possible that Polanski had reported Tinker’s plan to create pressure on the girl genius. The entire off-world population of Pittsburgh wanted the city to be reconnected to Earth. Hopefully no one tried to act on the information. Jane wasn’t about to explain what she knew to the emotionally distraught Makayla.

“I want to go home!” Makayla wailed. “I miss my mom and dad! I miss New York! The people here don’t even understand how small this world is. I keep dreaming that it gets smaller and smaller and then just disappears totally.”

Jane didn’t want to trust Makayla with her family secrets. The woman was emotionally unstable and desperate. “Things will work out,” Jane said, preparing her escape. “Just give it time.”

“I turned twenty-four last month!” Makayla sobbed. “I had a schedule all worked out. Graduate college by twenty-one. Work off-world three years to get money for law school, work experience that would make me stand out, and glowing recommendations from a wide range of people. Since I’d be a whole different world from my friends and family and the Internet, I’d devote all my time to studying for my LSAT. Leave Elfhome in November of this year and take my LSAT and apply to Yale.”

“You’ll be the only applicant that lived through an interdimensional war between three universes,” Virginia said.

“‘Lived’ is the key word here,” Makayla complained darkly.

The lights flickered.

All three of the women looked up at the overhead lamps.

“Is Hal experimenting with an electric fence again?” Virginia asked.

“I don’t think so,” Jane said slowly. She didn’t want to explain that Hal was preoccupied with a deadly snake loose in the offices. “I’ll go check on him.”

She headed back through the building as the lights flickered again. “Hal?”

“That’s not me!” Hal called back, somewhere near the break room.

Jane was in the big windowless room of the news bullpen when the lights went off, dropping her into darkness.

“Still not me!” Hal shouted, definitely in the break room itself.

Jane swore softly. She was still in her dress clothes for the meeting. She didn’t have her flashlight on her. Around her various uninterruptable power units signaled their distress with loud chirps. In the sea of darkness, lights started to appear as people turned on their phones and tablets to see. She didn’t want to run down her phone battery. She fumbled her way toward the break room. Despite Hal’s assurance that he had nothing to do with the blackout, she had a sinking feeling that things had just taken a turn for the worse.

“Can I have some light in the restroom?” a woman’s voice called out, muffled by a door.

There was a thud and a soft curse as someone walked into something.

“Come on! Can we have power?” a woman called.

“Where’s the snake?” Joe McGreevy called out with an edge of fear in his voice. He sounded close to Hal in the breakroom.

“Someone kick the generator!” Dmitri shouted from the direction of his office. “Get us back on the air!”

There was a deep, nearly inaudible rumble as the big diesel generator in the parking lot kicked on. The lights snapped back on.

“Where’s the snake?” Joe repeated in a slightly more stressed voice.

Jane headed for the break room, hoping said snake was in an opaque container as she recognized Joe McGreevy on a verge of a meltdown. Jane was fairly sure that the broken wrist had taught Hal not to tease Joe, but Nigel and Taggart didn’t know of the man’s phobia. The British naturalist might try to “educate” Joe.

The WQED breakroom was a large windowless room designed to be a kitchen for the incoming staff to use as a place to cook real meals until they got settled. It had a range, a dishwasher, pots and pans, dishes, and any number of storage containers. Some were small clear Rubbermaid. The others, like the Disney souvenir cookie bucket that Nigel was holding, were recycled larger containers.

“I had nothing to do with the blackout,” Hal said calmly, ignoring the fact that Joe stood trapped in the corner farthest from the door, looking like he wanted to phase through the wall.

“Jane, we need to talk,” Taggart said and glanced toward Joe. “Privately.”

“Where is the snake?” Joe shouted.

“It’s safely contained,” Taggart focused back on his laptop.

“You really don’t want to know,” Hal said calmly, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “If you were really concerned, you wouldn’t be in the same room as us.”

“I was here first!” Joe shouted.

“Oh, the snake?” Nigel lifted the lid on the bucket and held it out to Joe.

“No!” Jane shouted.

Joe smacked the bucket away from him with a scream. The bucket and snake parted company in midair, the snake landing on the table in front of Taggart.

“Taggart, move!” Jane caught the bucket as it came sailing past her. Taggart sprang back from the table, abandoning his laptop after slapping the screen down. “Calm down, Joe!”

Hal leaned back against the kitchen counter, obviously having learned from the last time not to get close to Joe. “Really? Can you not grow a pair? It’s not going to hurt you. Look how small it is! It’s like an earthworm — an earthworm on steroids — with deadly poison. Whoa, whoa, whoa!”

Joe had snatched up the chair that Taggart had been sitting on.

“Joe!” Jane didn’t really want to punch the man who filled out their paychecks. “Put down the chair, Joe!”

With a roar, Joe smashed the tabletop with the chair. It missed the snake but hit Taggart’s laptop.

Jane swore and leapt forward to save the laptop from further damage.

“We were in the break room, not Accounting,” Hal explained patiently to Dmitri as to why the head of Accounting was being taken out on an ambulance gurney. “It’s practically on the opposite side of the building! We needed a plastic bin to put the snake in. We didn’t know that someone had brought in fresh donuts and Joe was there, binge-eating them. You know how he just stands there and grazes when he’s stressed out.”

Jane was letting Hal talk because it was Hal’s magical power to charm people in and out of things. Also she had missed how it started and they hadn’t had time for her to verify the important details, like why Joe had been in the kitchen. She would have gone with Nigel, since there was a certain “familiarity breeds contempt” vibe that diminished Hal’s ability on Dmitri, but Nigel was part of the reason they needed an ambulance. Who would have thought that quiet, gentle Nigel could be so fierce when it came to protecting small animals?

Said snake was unharmed, recaptured, and currently back in the Disney cookie bucket.

Taggart was back at the table, checking the damage to his laptop, looking all kinds of concerned.

Dmitri turned to Jane. “Did you have to hit him with a chair?”

“I’m afraid that was me,” Nigel said. “It was Joe’s weapon of choice. Duel of honor and all.”

“What?” Dmitri sounded as confused as Jane felt.

“I was honor bound to protect the wee thing. I brought it into this building; I had to care for it until I released it into the wild. Mr. McGreevy chose to wield a chair; I simply returned his volley.”

“Right,” Dmitri said after a long, calculating stare. He turned his attention to Taggart frowning at his laptop. “Is it broken? We still need the video for next week’s show.”

Taggart looked to Nigel and did an odd side glance to Dmitri. Taggart was horrible at lying. He also knew the limits of his ability.

“Unfortunately”—Nigel picked up whatever silent message that Taggart was trying to beam to him, — “prior to the blackout, Taggart had his laptop plugged in and there was a power surge that seems to have corrupted some of our data.”

Jane remembered that Taggart had needed to talk to her privately. He must have found something in the video.

“Surely you have a backup,” Dmitri said.

“The Chased by Monsters equipment isn’t fully compatible with the ancient stuff in the PB&G truck.” Jane kept to the truth. The gear that Nigel and Taggart brought with them from Earth far outstripped anything on Elfhome. “We’re really having to juggle. We can upload video from PB&G’s equipment to CBM, but not vice versa. The software won’t run on the old operating system. We port everything through CBM because it gives us more control over the video editing.”

Her team was nodding along with her statements. She wished they would stop as that would probably tip off Dmitri the moment she needed to start lying.

“We have such a limited memory capacity on the PB&G equipment that we normally scrub the cards after we upload the video.” Again, true. Head nods all around. She and Hal had been using the oldest cameras that WQED owned because Hal routinely broke everything. Since Dmitri was focused on her, Jane couldn’t frown at her team. “We’ve been shooting with both cameras and then consolidating the footage on Taggart’s laptop.” They also had backups but she didn’t want to discuss whether Taggart wanted the footage “lost” for some reason. “He has a state-of-the-art machine that handles the editing easily. Even the machines here at the office struggle with the new editing software.”

Still true.

She paused, hating the need to lie to Dmitri. The man had trusted her since the day they first met. He’d given her everything: a career that she loved, responsibilities beyond what her education would normally obtain, a legal shield when Hal had gotten out of her control, the man of her dreams, and even her little sister’s safe return. The man was responsible for the safety of the entire station, though, not just her team. Because he wouldn’t be able to lie to the elves, she had to keep the truth from him to keep him safe.

Dmitri stopped her with a look. “So you’re saying that you need to film more footage?”

Jane breathed out with relief that Dmitri had skipped ahead, probably guessing that he wasn’t going to get the full truth if he pushed. She glanced to Taggart, who nodded. “Yes.”

Dmitri pointed at Nigel. “Don’t bring any more creatures into this station.”

“Yes, sir.” Nigel said.

“There was a reflection that I hadn’t noticed.” Taggart pointed to the screen of his laptop.

They had centered next week’s show on the growing menace of wargs. They had been camped out at the top of the South Hills fire tower at edge of the Rim. Because of the remote location, Boo had been with them. Boo had helped out by holding the light reflector as they filmed. Her little sister had just gotten the magical tattoo that gave her the massive tengu wings. Unlike the other tengu, Boo’s wings were angelic white. Occasionally she lost control of them as she was still learning the complex muscle memory for flight.

Somehow they hadn’t noticed that every time Boo opened her wings, there was a perfect reflection of them in the fire tower’s windows.

“If they were black like the other tengu, I would say just run with it. The tengu are trusted allies now, no one would be surprised that we had at least one helping out on the hunt. But they’re white.” Taggart didn’t finish the statement.

“Can’t you edit them out?” Hal said. “Industrial Light and Magic it?”

Taggart shook his head. “It would take me days to erase her out of every frame. If she hadn’t been opening and closing them, it wouldn’t have been as difficult. There’s other factors that make it tricky — but it boils down to time. I can grind it out for the following week but not this week.”

“But this means we need to film and edit an entire show in less than twenty-four hours,” Hal said. “We don’t have a script. We don’t have a monster. We have nothing.”

“We have a city at war and a secret militia,” Jane whispered. “I’m sure we can come up with something.”