Wolf Who Rules

Chapter 16: Little Monkey Brain

After a long, long cottony warm sleep, Tinker was able to view the last few days with a saner eye. Thinking of Nathan threatened to reduce her back to the painful void of grief, so she considered the last dream with Esme and Black. Obviously, something had drastically gone wrong with Esme, but what did her mother think Tinker could do for her? Esme was in space — someplace — in another universe, far, far away. And who was Black? The tengu woman obviously had been on Earth to meet Tinker’s father, but where was she now? Why was Tinker dreaming about her in conjunction with Esme? Was it because Black was a tengu colony and on one of the ships that Esme crashed into?

The dreams of Alice and Dorothy — little girls lost far from home — held a sad irony; Esme thought Dorothy should stay in Oz — but obviously that wasn’t what she wanted for herself now. So what did she want from Tinker? Even if Esme’s ship crashed, that would have taken place eighteen years ago, shortly before Tinker was born.

In the movie the yellow brick road started when Dorothy crashed the house into Oz — bringing a stain of sepia on a world of lush color. The discontinuity appeared as a stain of blue. Tinker’s nightmares had gotten out of hand the same day that the Ghostlands formed — even if the first one with Esme and Black came two days later. The first dream had been Alice in Wonderland, the second Wizard of Oz, and the last was Esme going through the hyperphase gate; little girls crashing into other worlds.

Tinker sprawled in the enclave garden, watching the sun shift through the tree branches. As usual, she had a full Hand standing around, doing nothing but watch her think. They shifted to full alert as someone came through the gate into this private area. Lemonseed carried in a tray of tea and cookies — midmorning snack. Tinker started to sit up but Lemonseed tsked at her and crouched beside her to layout a mini-picnic. Exquisite china bowls of pale tea. Little perfect cookies. A platter of rich rosewood. A small square of printed silk.

Esme wasn’t the only girl that fell into another world.

“Can you have lunch packed?” Tinker knew that the enclave’s staff most likely had the meal half-finished. “We’re going out.”

“Yes, domi.” Lemonseed bowed and left to make it so.

“Where are we going?” Stormsong asked.

We? How did it get to this point that she was so comfortable with having all these people in her life? No, she guessed she wasn’t really that at ease — but the edges of her discomfort were wearing away. Like the fact that she could strip in front of Pony without thinking. That it took Lemonseed’s arrival to remind her that an entire staff of nearly a hundred people were poised around her — waiting for her to do something. Anything. Be the domi. Save the world again.

“The scrap yard,” she told Stormsong but thought ‘Home.’

She drained the tea to be polite, gathered up the cookies and went to change.

Two newspapers, still neatly folded and bagged, lay in the driveway of the scrap yard. She picked them up on their way in, wonder why Oilcan hadn’t brought them in. Tinker expected to find her cousin at work and was both relieved and disappointed that he wasn’t. She didn’t know how he would take Nathan’s death. Too her, it was a dark well of guilt and grief with a crumbling edge. She was trying to keep her distance just so she could keep functioning. Ironically, she was fairly sure she could deal with Oilcan being angry at her more than she could help him with his grief.

“You know — I just don’t get it.” Stormsong said as Tinker was puttering around her workshop off of the junkyard’s offices, trying to get back into being herself.

“Get what?” Tinker asked.

“This place, you, and Windwolf — it just doesn’t — doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah, I’ve never understood why he fell in love with someone like me.”

“I do. You can go toe to toe with him. It’s this place that doesn’t make sense. You two are too big for something like this.”

“Big?”

“With your abilities — why did you limit yourself to this tiny corner of the world?”

That sounded like Lain — who had always pushed for her to go to college, leave Pittsburgh, do something more with her life. She thought her plans were big enough, but it suddenly dawned on her that they were plans she laid when she was thirteen. They seemed huge when she was a child — even though they were larger than what other people planned — but yes, she’d grown to fit, and then the limits were starting to chafe. Had Lain seen a truth that she herself was blind to?

She veered from that line of thinking. She distracted herself by poking at her insecurities. “I think it’s fairly obvious what attracted Windwolf to me — I look like Jewel Tears. She’s his prefect woman. And I can’t measure up to that — elegance.”

“No. You only think that because you’ve never met Otter Dance.”

“Pony’s mother?”

“Ever notice that Pony is the shortest of the sekasha? Otter Dance is half Stone Clan sekasha.”

Tinker turned to look at Pony standing beside Cloudwalker; he was a half a head shorter yet wider in the shoulders and deeper in the chest than Cloudwalker. Pony was the most compact elf she’d ever met until the Stone Clan arrived. Now that she looked at him, she could see points of similarity. His eyes were brown where everyone else was blue. The shape of his face was different.

“You mean we — Jewel Tears and I — look like Otter Dance?”

“To know Otter Dance is to love her. Personality wise, you’re much more like Otter Dance than Jewel Tears could ever pretend to be — and she did try.”

Tinker wasn’t sure how to feel about that. She cleared her iboard. She needed a project — something big and complex — to keep from thinking about Nathan and all the messy bits of her life. Something that would help keep Pittsburgh safe from the elves, the oni — and the dragon. Oh gods, in all the chaos she forgotten about the dragon. There was a worthwhile project, especially since she hadn’t collected enough data on the Ghostlands yet.

She called up an animation program and created a quick rough model of the dragon, using a ferret body, a male lion’s head and a snake skin to cover the frame. Dragging the dragon model out onto the iboard, she let it gallop across the vast white. There had been a spell painted onto the dragon’s hide. She wasn’t sure what the spell did. Was it how the dragon raised its shield or was it how the oni were using to control it? It seemed to her that the wild waving of the mane might have triggered the spell — much like the domana hand gestures triggered their shields.

“What do you think?” She asked Pony. “How did it raise its shield?”

Pony put his hands to his head and wriggled his fingers. “It’s mane.”

Stormsong and the others that had been in the valley with her that morning nodded in agreement.

Okay, so the mane worked like domana fingers. She paused the dragon, added a “shield” effect to her model, and restarted the animation. “Next question is — does anything breach the shield?”

“Our shields do not stop light and air, because we must see and breathe,” Pony said. “They also have a limit to the force they can absorb at one moment. They will take a hundred shots fired in a hundred heartbeats, but not a hundred fired in one heartbeat.”

“So light and air.” Tinker opened a window in the corner of the iboard and noted this.

“Spell arrows don’t affect the dragon,” Cloudwalker reminded her.

Tinker wrote: different frequency of light? And then thinking of Pony driving his sword point through the shield, she added, “Speed of kinetic weapon?”

“Pony, can I see your sword?”

He drew his sword and held it out to her to examine. “Careful, domi, it is very sharp.”

She knew that the ejae had magically tempered ironwood blades, but she never examined them closely before. It was single length of rich cherry colored wood with a bone guard. The very tip came to a fine point. There was no sign of the spell that created the blade, which she supposed was necessary since the sekasha used their swords while shield spells were active. The surface area of the tip was smaller than a bullet; if they both struck at the same speed, the ejae would have a greater PSI. Pony’s slow push through the dragon’s shield meant that wasn’t the factor.

She wasn’t sure how they could use a “slow” weapon against the dragon. It would be unlikely that the beastie would ever standstill like that again. She considered a giant glue trap, sleep gas, and mega stun guns. They all had their drawbacks from “what do you use as bait?” to “would it do anything but just piss the dragon off?” That got her wondering about what would affect the dragon once they got past its shields. Where were its vital organs? Would poison necessarily kill it? Elves couldn’t tolerate some of the food humans ate in abundance. The inverse could be true — what was poisonous for Elfhome creatures might not hurt the dragon.

Maybe the stupid dream was telling her that she needed to melt the dragon with a bucket of water. Waterjets had jet speeds around Mach 3 and could cut through several inches of steel. She didn’t have any in her junkyard, but perhaps she could salvage one and modify it…

The sekasha’s were rubbing off on her. She really liked the simple “hit it with a big gun” solution. Too bad they couldn’t simply make the shield go away so “a big gun” was a safe bet.

Her stomach growled. She realized that she had spent hours in front of the iboard.

“What time is it?” Maybe she should take a break to eat the packed lunch.

“I’m not sure. That clock is broken.” Stormsong pointed to an old alarm clock that Tinker had dismantling to use in a project.

We’re murdered time, it’s always six o’clock.

Wait — wasn’t that a line from Alice in Wonderland? During the tea party, didn’t they talk about time not working for them? She sorted through the things she brought from the enclave, found the book, and flipped through it. Under the drawing of the Mad Hatter, there was a footnote that caught her eye.

“Arthur Stanley Eddington, as well as less distinguished writers on relativity theory, have compared the Mad Tea Party, where it is always six o’clock, with that portion of De Sitter’s model of the cosmos in which time stands eternally still. (See Chapter 10 of Eddington’s Space Time and Gravitation.)”

“Oh shit.” Tinker took out her datapad and pulled up her father’s plans on the gate.

“Shit?” Pony asked.

“Excrement.” Stormsong translated. “It’s a curse.”

“Shit,” Pony echoed.

“That aside, what did you figure out?” Stormsong asked.

“I made a huge mistake in the variable for time on the gate equations. And if I did it — I bet the oni did too. These plans, as they stand — all the spaceships would have arrived at the same moment. That’s why they collided.”

“When did they go to?” Pony asked.

“I think — that they were held in time — until the gate was destroyed. They finished their journey — all five ships — three days ago.”

“Your mother found herself in great danger and you’re her only link to home,” Stormsong murmured.

“Yeah, at which point, she started to hound me with nightmares.” Tinker tugged at her hair. “But what the hell am I supposed to do? I mean, the good news is that obviously she’s alive — for now. The gods only know where she is. She could be on the other side of the galaxy. And which galaxy? This one? Earth’s? Onihida? We’re talking a mind-boggling large haystack to lose a needle in. Even if she was in space over Elfhome, what am I to do? What could I possibly do?”

“Forget the egotistical she-snake,” Stormsong said. “You have pressing duties here. Her problems are not your concern.”

“But why then, do things keep turning up? Like the pearl necklace, the black willow, and Reinholds? The dreams relate to me and my world, somehow. Don’t they?”

Tinker saw a troubled look spread across Stormsong’s face before the sekasha turned away, hiding her unease.

“Oh, don’t do that!” Tinker picked up the morning’s newspaper, still tightly folded in its bag, and aimed a smack at Stormsong’s back.

Stormsong caught the newspaper before it connected and gave her a hard look.

“I need help here,” Tinker jerked the newspaper free. “This is part of the whole working together. I need to know what you know about dreaming.”

Stormsong sighed. “That is a wound I don’t like to dig into. Everyone assumed that my mother had some great vision when she conceived me — and no one invested more into that myth than me. But I did not have the talent or the patience for it. I was too much my father. I like solving problems with a sword. And I don’t like feeling like I’m failing you.”

Tinker fussed with getting the newspaper out of its bag so she didn’t have to face Stormsong’s pain. “You’re not failing me.”

Speaking of failing someone, the newspaper’s headline was “Policeman Slain.”

Nathan’s body was draped with a white cloth in the island of light on the black river of night highway. Nathan Czernowski, age 28, found beheaded on Ohio River Boulevard. She stood there clutching the newspaper as faintness swept through her. How could seeing it in print make it more real than seeing his body lying in front of her?

Stormsong continued, “As you’re finding out the hard way, dreamers can join for a gestalt effect, but unless they share foci, the ending dream is conflicted.”

Tinker pulled her attention away from the newspaper. “What?”

“Dreams are maps for the future.” Stormsong held out her right hand. “If the dreamers share foci—” Stormsong pressed her hands, matching up the fingers. “Then the two maps overlaid remain easy to understand. But if the dreamers don’t share foci—” Stormstorm shifted her hands so her fingers crosshatched. “There is a conflict. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to tell which element belongs to which foci. The pearl necklace was from your foci. The wizard of oz, it appears, to be from your mother.”

“Foci being…?”

Stormsong pursed her lips. “Foci reflect goals and desires. Among elves, that is one’s clan and household. I’m not sure humans can share foci like elves can. Humans are more — self-centered.”

The newspaper screamed at how self-centered Tinker had been.

“So, Esme, Black and I are operating at cross-purposes.” Tinker folded the accusing headline away and went to stuff it in the recycling bin. “And my dreams may or may not have anything to do with helping with the mess we’re in.”

“Yes, there is no telling. At least, I can’t, not with my abilities. Wolf has sent for help from my mother’s people. They might be able to determine something since they share our foci in regards to the oni.”

“Where my mother could care less.”

“Exactly.”

Tinker dropped the paper into the recycling bin, the top newspaper caught her eye. The headline read: Viceroy’s Guard Kill Five Snipers, Gossamer Slain. She lifted out the paper.

When did this happen?

The paper was dated Tuesday. Tuesday? Wasn’t she awake on Tuesday? Yes, she was — she had spent Tuesday at Reinholds — why hadn’t anyone told her? The paper also reported that the EIA declared martial law, that the treaty been temporarily extended until Sunday, and plans to screen everyone living in Chinatown. How did she miss all this? She dug through the pile of papers uncovering growing chaos that she been oblivious to. Wednesday’s paper had stories on the lock down of the city by the royal elfin troops, a wave of arrests of suspected human sympathizers, the execution of more disguised oni, and the start of a rationing system as fears of the Pittsburgh dollar collapsing triggered massive stockpiling. Above the headline was an extra banner proclaiming: Four Days to Treaty End.

Four days? Was that today?

The other unread paper was dated Friday. She had lost at least a day to drugged sleep. The top banner read: Two Days to Treaty End. The Pittsburgh Police had called a blue flu strike when the EIA closed Nathan’s murder case.

Oh, gods, what a mess.

“What day is this?” she asked Stormsong. “Did I sleep through Saturday too?”

“It is Friday.” Stormsong said.

“Domi,” Pony said from the door. “It is the lone one.”

Lone one?

The sekasha escorted in Tooloo, who must have walked up the hill from her store. Tinker stared at her with new eyes. Not that the female had changed; Tooloo was as she had always been Tinker’s entire life. There were no new creases in the face full of wrinkles. Her silver hair still reached her ankles. Tinker even recognized her faded, purple silk gown and battered high-top tennis shoes — Tooloo had been wearing them when Tinker and Pony helped her milk her cows two months ago.

Only now Tinker realized how odd it was for an elf in a world of elves to live alone. What clan and caste had she been born into? Why wasn’t she part of a household? Was it because she was a half-elf? If she was half human, born and raised on Earth, how could she be so fluid in High Elvish, and know all things arcane? If she was a full, blooded elf, trapped on Earth when the pathways were dismantled, why hadn’t she gone back to her people? The three centuries was a short time for elves.

Tinker doubted if Tooloo would tell her if she asked. Tooloo had always refused to be known. She went by an obvious nickname, neither human nor elfin in origin. Not once, in eighteen years that Tinker knew her, had she ever mentioned her parents. She would not commit to an age, the length of time she lived on earth, not even a favorite color.

Tooloo squirmed in Cloudwalker’s hold. “Oh, you murderous little thing! You had to satisfy that little monkey brain of yours. I told you, starve the beast called curiosity — but noooo, you had to play with Czernowski and now you’ve killed him.”

Tinker felt sad as she realized she’d lost yet another part of her life. “I didn’t mean for Nathan to get killed.”

“Oh, you didn’t mean to! Do you think those threadbare words will heal his family, all off grieving over his headless body?”

“I’m sorry it happened.” Tinker swallowed down on the pain that words caused her. “I–I—wasn’t paying attention when I should have been — and I’m so sorry — but there’s nothing I can do. I was wrong. I should have listened to you from the very start — but I didn’t see where all this was going to lead.”

“Pawgh, this is all Windwolf’s fault — killing my bright wee human and making a dirty Skin Clan scumbag in her image.” Tooloo spat.

“This has nothing to do with Windwolf making me an elf.”

“Does it? My wee one never had such superciliousness of power.”

“Supercil-whatis?”

Tooloo glanced at Pony standing behind Tinker. “Giving you sekasha is like giving an elephant roller-skates — stupid, ridiculous and dangerous.”

Tooloo could say what she wanted about her, but now she was going too far to include the sekasha too.

“Yes, I killed Nathan,” Tinker said, “but I’m not the only one to blame. I’m a stupid clueless little girl, but you’ve lived with humans for over 200 years — you knew exactly how Nathan would react if —” and then it dawned on Tinker and she gasped with horror. “Oh sweet gods, you wanted him to think I was a whore! You deliberately misled him! You evil she-goat!”

Tooloo slapped her hard across the face enough to make stars dance in her vision.

Tinker heard the sekasha draw their blades and threw out her hands to keep Nathan’s death from repeating. “No! No! Don’t you dare hurt her!” Once she was sure that she was obeyed, she turned back to the stranger who raised her. “Why? Why did you do that to Nathan? You had to see it coming!”

“Because nothing else would have slapped you out of wallowing in your own piss. The city is about to run with blood unless you do something. Czernowski was the sacrificial lamb to save this city.”

“I was trying to! I don’t know how!”

“Use that little monkey brain of yours! The elves are about to march all over this city with jack boots. I’ve lived with humans for hundreds of years. They are good, compassionate people. I lived through the American Revolutionary War, its Civil War, the fight for woman suffrage, and the struggle for civil rights — and all those advancements for equality among humans is about to be flushed down the crapper. It’s already started — they’re searching through Chinatown, dragging people out of their homes and testing them and killing them where they stand.”

Tinker glanced to Stormsong since the rant had been in English. Stormsong nodded in confirmation. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“You’ve been too fragile.”

She couldn’t trust Tooloo’s version of this; the ‘lone one’ kept whatever truths she had to herself. Nor, as much as she loved them, count on the elves in her life to understand what it was to be human. Tinker gathered up the newspapers; she needed their human-biased facts. And Maynard — she needed to talk to Maynard.

Red was becoming a predominant color in Pittsburgh, like an early autumn. They encountered four roadblocks on the way to the EIA offices; all manned by laedin caste Fire Clan soldiers.

“If True Flame has this many warriors, why do we need the Stone Clan?” Tinker had let Pony drive, but she hung over the front seat to talk to him and Stormsong. The backseat was crowded with the other three sekasha.

“Stone Clan magic can find individuals in a wilderness and things hidden in the ground.” Pony told her.

“It’s like calling in bloodhounds,” Stormsong said in English.

Tinker remembered the sonar-like spell that Jewel Tears used. Yes, that should make finding the oni hidden in the forest easier. She wondered how the Stone Clan would fare, though, in the steel-riddled city.

“And if you can not solve the problem with the Ghostlands,” Cloudwalker added. “They should be able to. They closed the natural pathways after the first invasion.”

Stormsong made a rude noise. “There is a difference between collapsing caves and dealing with whatever is wrong with Ghostlands.”

“The Ghostlands should collapse on their own.” Tinker was growing less sure of that — she would have expected the rate of decay to be faster. This morning marked the fourth day since she reduced Turtle Creek to chaos. Now there was something not everyone could claim: I reduced a square mile of land into pure chaos. It made her sound like a small atomic warhead — someone dropped a Tinker on us!

The EIA offices directed her back across the Allegheny River to Chinatown. There she found Maynard overseeing the testing of the Chinese population. A mix of laedin caste soldiers and Wyverns were systematically emptying a house, putting the occupants into a line to be tested by the EIA. As she approached, it became clear that the process was hampered by the fact that most of the elves and many of the Chinese didn’t speak English. East Ohio Street was cacophony of shouted instructions, crying and pleading. The coroner van — identified by bold letters — stood at the far end of the street. Blood scented the hot summer air. And for one dizzy moment, she was back on Ohio River Boulevard, splattered with Nathan’s blood.

“Domi, are you alright?” Pony murmured into her ear as he supported her by the arm. He’d activated his shields at some point and they now spilled down over her.

She nodded.

“It is clear!” One of the Wyverns came out of a nearby building shouted in High Elvish.

There was a pulse of magic, and she felt the house, from the pipes underneath it to the tip of the chimneys. There wasn’t anyone inside. Apparently that was the point. On some unheard command, the Wyverns moved down to the next building. Annoyingly, because of her height, Tinker couldn’t see through the crowd to spot the Stone Clan domana directing the search.

“Is Jewel Tears here?” she asked Stormsong, who could see over the heads of most of the humans.

Stormsong shook her head. “It is the mad one, Forest Moss.”

“Oh, joy,” Tinker muttered. “Where is Maynard?”

“This way.” Pony kept hold of her elbow.

She thought they would have to push their way through the crowd, but as they approached the humans and elves, the crowd parted as shoved by an invisible wedge. In the human faces there was a mix of fear and hope. They wanted her to be one of them but afraid she was wholly an elf.

The crowd was avoiding a section of sidewalk. As Tinker drew even with it, she saw that is was covered with congealing blood, thick with black flies. As the sekasha brushed passed, some of the flies rose in fat, heavy buzzing. The rest continued to feed.

“I want this to stop,” Tinker whispered to Pony, dreading his answer.

“This is by order of the crown,” Pony said. “There is nothing you can do to stop it.”

Maynard saw Stormsong first and then scanned downwards to find Tinker. “What are you doing here?”

“I want to talk to you about this stuff.” Tinker waved the newspaper at Maynard.

“I’m busy at the moment. Why don’t you get your husband to explain it to you?”

“Because you’re here. I have the power to pin you down and make you explain it to me. And you’ll use words I can understand.”

Maynard glanced at the paper. “What don’t you understand? That article is fairly clear.”

“What can I do?”

He gave her a long unreadable look before saying, “I’m not sure. Windwolf bought us some time, but without proof that the gate is in orbit and possibly repairable, that time runs out Sunday.”

Figures, after everything she had gone through to destroy the gate, she now had to save it.

“So,” Tinker said. “If I can prove the damn thing is still up there, would that help?”

Maynard’s eyes widen in surprise. “You think you can do that?”

It was tempting to say yes, but she had to be honest. “I don’t know. I can try. It’s a fucking discontinuity in Turtle Creek, across at least two or three universes. If Earth is one of those universes, there might be a way to use the Ghostlands to communicate.”

“The elves are keeping everyone away from the Ghostlands,” Maynard said. “The scientists at the commune are ready to storm the place for chance to study it.”

“Keep them away from it,” Tinker said. “At least until we can make sure the Fire Clan and the Stone Clan don’t kill them on sight.”

Maynard looked away, as if to hide what he thought. When he turned back, his face was back to its carefully neutral — nearly elfin — facade.

“What do you fucking want from me?” Tinker cried. “I was raised in a junkyard!”

“You’re the only one in a position to understand fully what is to be human,” Maynard said, “and still be able to do anything about this situation.”

“But I don’t know what to do.”

“I know you don’t.” Maynard said but didn’t add anything more — which would have been a big help.

There was pulse from Forest Moss and this time the building wasn’t empty. She — and Forest Moss — picked up two people still inside on the second floor. A shout went up. Tinker turned to see the Wyverns swarmed in through the door of tiny second-hand shop. Like flashbulbs going off, she felt spells flaring the small rooms into brilliance, one after another. The Wyverns quickly worked to room with the hidden couple.

“Oh, no.” Tinker started for the store.

Stormsong pulled her short. “They are only killing oni.”

Was that supposed to make it better? Much as she hated the kitsune, she didn’t want to see Chiyo beheaded. She didn’t want Riki anymore dead than she wanted Nathan hurt.

“We can’t go in there — it would be asking for fight.” Stormsong kept hold of her. “One we can not win. Wait. Please.”

Much as she wanted to protect the strangers, she couldn’t bear the thought of sacrificing her sekasha.

Tinker nodded numbly and pulled out of Stormsong’s hold. “Let’s get closer.”

She lost sight of the storefront beyond the wall of backs. This time her sekasha had to clear a path, pushing people aside to make what they thought was a wide enough path for her. Maybe if she was an elephant.

The Wyverns muscled out only one person. They dragged him to a white-haired elf, announcing, “We killed one inside — it tried to run. This one is spell marked, but it was with an oni.”

It was Tommy Chang.

“Kill him.” The male domana said.

“No!” Tinker plunged forward, forced her way through the towering Wyverns to Tommy’s side. “Don’t hurt him!”

The white haired elf turned and Tinker gasped at the damage done to his face.

“Ah, what honest horror!” The half-blinded elf said. “You must be the child bride. Not much to you — how did you come out in one piece?”

“Because they underestimated me.” Tinker tugged Tommy’s arm out of the wyvern’s hold. “Look, he’s been tested. He’s not oni.”

“He might be mixed blood,” said the half-blinded elf.

“Who gives a flying fuck?” Tinker snarled in English.

“Domi,” Stormsong murmured behind her.

“He’s not one of them.” Tinker switched back to High Elvish.

“How do you know?” Forest Moss asked. “From what I hear, the tengu fooled you.”

She was not going to let them kill someone she knew. She stared at Tommy, trying to remember something that would prove he was what she thought he was — to herself as much as to them. Maddeningly, he said nothing in his own defense, just stood there, wrapped in his bulletproof cool. Didn’t he know that no one was swordproof?

True, she’d trusted Riki blindly, but she didn’t know oni existed, and had awarded him the trust she gave all strangers. Her world had been a different place not so long ago.

“I know because —” she started in order to stall them. Because she’d known Tommy half her life. His family had owned a restaurant in Oakland since before Startup. He’d been a driving force organizing the hoverbike racing, and most summers she saw him on a weekly basis. He wasn’t a stranger. She wouldn’t immediately say he was “good” people. He had a temper and a reputation of being ruthless when it came to business; that didn’t make him any more evil than her. She suspected the elves wouldn’t accept those facts as a good argument for his humanity. Riki had proved her judgment was flawed.

What could she say as proof that these elves would accept? They were growing impatient for her answer.

“Because—” and then unexpectedly, Riki provided the answer. “Because when the tengu came looking for me, he didn’t know where to find me.”

That puzzled them, which was fine, as she needed to cram a lot into this argument to make it sound.

“Two years ago, Tommy bought a custom delta hoverbike off me. He needed to write a check, and there were the pink slips — forms to show transfer of ownership for tax reasons. I told him my human name, which was Alexander Graham Bell.” Which of course triggered a round of teasing from Tommy, and occasionally afterwards, he’d call her ‘Tinker Bell.’ “I even told him why I was called that.” In truth, she had been trying to stem the teasing with a sympathy play since Tommy’s mother had also been murdered. “And that my father was the man who invented the orbital gate. I told him — he didn’t tell the oni.”

That seemed to buy it for the Wyverns. They released their hold on Tommy.

Magic suddenly flared across her senses, like a gasoline pool catching flame. Tinker spun around but there was nothing to see. Forest Moss made a motion, and she turned to watch him call on the Stone Clan Spell Stones and use the magic to trigger his shields. Around them, the Wyverns and her Hand went alert.

“What was that? Did you feel that?” She asked Forest Moss.

“It was a spell breaking.” Forest Moss cocked the fingers of his left hand and brought them to his mouth. “Ssssstada.”

The spell Forest Moss triggered was a variation of the ground radar. A long, narrow wedge of power formed from the male elf to the river’s edge. He shifted his right hand, and the wedge swept northward through Chinatown. At the heart of the Chinatown, he hit an intense writhing of power.

“How odd,” Forest Moss said.

“What is that?” Tinker noted that Tommy, being smart, had vanished while they had been distracted.

Forest Moss gave her an odd look. “It’s a ley scry. It lets me see recent and active disturbances in the ley lines. I don’t know what that spell was supposed to do, but it just violently altered, and it’s now acting as a pump on a fiutana.”

“Oh shit. The black willow.”

The great doors of the refrigerated warehouse stood open to the summer heat. Magic flowed down over the loading down in a purple haze of potential. Tinker cautiously pulled the Rolls around, trying to angle the car so they could see into the cave darkness, but the dock was too high, and the door, facing the afternoon eastern sky, was cave dark. Tinker flicked on the headlights, but even the high beams failed to illuminate the interior.

“I want a closer look.” Tinker put the Rolls into park. She wished she could leave the engine running, but it would be a mistake with this much free magic in the area.

She got out and the sekasha followed. Magic flooded over her, hot and fast. The heat tossed the chimes on the ley shrine, making them jangle in shrill alarm. A smell like burnt cinnamon mixed with a taste like heated honey. The invisible brilliance hinted by the shimmering purple made her eyes water.

“Be careful.” She blinked away tears. “The magic is all around us.”

“Even we can see that.” Stormsong’s shields outlined her in hard, blue radiance. “Your shields, domi.”

Yeah, now would be a good time for that.

Tinker set up a resonance with the spell stones and then triggered her shield spell. Once the winds were wrapped around her, she waded up the steps, making sure that she didn’t disturb the spell by gesturing.

The padlock had been cut off with a bolt cutter. Her spell hadn’t failed; someone had broken in and sabotaged it.

Violet sparkled and shifted in the black of the warehouse, casting patterns of shadows and near light. Tinker couldn’t see anything that looked like the black willow. Stormsong tried the lights, but the switch had no effect.

“The flood would have popped the light bulbs.” There was no way Tinker was going in there blind. “Do we have a light?”

“Yes.” Pony took out a spell light, closed his left hand tight around the glass orb, and activated it. He played a thin beam of searchlight intensity over the room.

They had left the black willow tied down on pallets. The restraints lay in tatters. Splitters of wood marked the pallet’s destruction. The fork lift sat upended like a child’s toy. Dead leaves rode convection currents, dancing across the cement floor with a thin, dry skittering noise.

“Where is it?” Tinker whispered.

“I don’t see it.” Pony swept the room again.

“Neither do I.” Tinker glanced back to the street. Where was Forest Moss? That ground radar thing would come in handy just about now. “Let’s turn off the compressor and at least stop this flood.”

They moved through the warehouse to the back room. The small windowless room was empty of trees, with only the purring compressor to wreak havoc. A crowbar lay across the metal tracings of her spell, encircled with charring. Odd distortions wavered around the compressor.

Cursing, she started for the breaker box.

“Domi, no!” Stormsong caught her shoulder and stilled her. “Stay here at the door. Let Cloudwalker do it.”

“The willow isn’t in here.” Tinker nevertheless stayed at the door as Stormsong asked while Cloudwalker crossed to the breaker box and cut the power to the compressor. “See, no dan—”

Her only warning was the ominous rustle of leaves, and then the forklift struck her shield from behind. She yelped, spinning around to see the forklift rebound back across the warehouse.

“Shields!” Stormsong shouted.

Tinker had let her shields drop in her surprise. She fumbled through the resonance set up as Pony’s narrow light played off the suddenly close wizen “face” of the black willow. They had to have walked straight past, somehow blind to it. It filled the warehouse now, blocking them from the door. It lifted a foot root and replanted it in booming sound that shook the floor. Its branches rattled as it blindly felt the confines of the room. A dozen of the arms encountered the upended forklift, scooped it up again and flung it at her.

Tinker snapped through the shield spell, already wincing, as the forklift sailed toward her. At the last second the winds wrapped tight around her and the forklift struck the distortion’s edge.

“Shit!” Tinker swore as the forklift bounced back across the warehouse to wedge itself sidewise into the far door. “There’s no other door, right?”

“No, domi,” Pony said.

Tinker wasn’t sure to be amazed or annoyed that Pony sounded so calm, as if she could pull doorways out her butt. “Oh damn, oh damn, oh damn. Okay, I know I’m smarter than this tree.”

The black willow lifted another root foot and shook the world as it planted it back down, a few yards closer to them, instantly pulverizing the cement floor, digging roots down into the building’s footing.

“But I have some doubts,” Tinker admitted, “that brains are going to win over brawn this time.”

What did she have to work with? She scanned the room of bare concrete block as the willow stomped ponderously closer. Crow bar. Boom! Compressor. Five sekasha. Five ejae. Boom! Circuit breaker box.

“Stormsong, what do you know about electricity?” Tinker asked the most tech savvy of her Hand.

“Nothing useful,” Stormsong said.

Boom!

“Nothing?” Tinker squeaked.

“It lives in a box in the wall.” Stormsong detailed out what she knew. “It goes away if you don’t pay for it.”

Boom!

Right — nothing useful. Scratch having Stormsong rig an electrical weapon. Just as well, good chance they’d just electrocute themselves.

The black willow stretched out its hundreds of whipping branches to scrabble at her shield. Tinker forced herself to scan the room again, and ignore the massive creature trying to reach her.

“The roof! It’s only plywood and rubber. See if you can cut through.”

The tree found the gap between the top of the tall doorway and her shield. The thin branches pushed through the space, caught hold of the doorjamb and started to pull.

“Oh, shit!” Tinker cried. “If it makes the door larger, I’m not going to be able to hold it! It’s coming in!”

There was a pulse of magic from Forest Moss, instantly defining the Stone Clan elf with Wyverns out by the Rolls, and themselves, pinned inside by the black willow.

“Forest Moss!” Tinker shouted. “Get it off us!”

The concrete walls buckled under the strain, tearing free to leave sawtooth openings, exposing twisted and snapped rebar. The branches flung the debris against the back wall of the warehouse like mad shovels.

“Forest Moss, get it—”

And suddenly the branches wrapped around her, cocooning her shield in living wicker, and lifted her off the ground.

“Domi!” Pony shouted.

The black willow heaved her up. Its branches creaked as it tried to crush her shields down.

Oh please hold! Oh please hold!

A dark orifice opened in the crook where its main limbs branched from massive trunk. As the tree tried to stuff her into the fleshy maw, she realized what the opening was.

They have mouths! I wonder if Lain knows that. Oh shit, it’s trying to eat me!

Luckily the diameter of her shielding was larger than its mouth. It was trying to fit a golf ball into a beer bottle. She held still and silent, afraid to disrupt her shields. Smell of burnt cinnamon and honey filled her senses and her vision blurred — the tree fading slightly — even as it repeatedly jammed her up against its mouth.

It has some kind of hallucinogen — that’s how we missed it, she thought.

And then the tree flung her through the wall.

The street beyond was a flicker of brightness, and then she plowed through a confusion of small, dim, dusty rooms of an abandon office building beyond. She felt Forest Moss track her through the building. His power flashed ahead of her, surged through the next building in her flight path, and locked down on all the load bearing supports.

The white haired shit was going to pull the building down on her! She’d be buried alive — shields or not!

Dropping her shields, she made a desperate grab for a battered steel desk as she flew over it. She missed the edge and left five contrails across its dusty top. A floor to ceiling window stood beyond the desk. She smashed through the window into open sky.

I’m going to die.

And then Riki caught her, wrapping strong arms around her and labored upwards in a loud rustle of black wings.

“Riki!” She clung to the tengu, heart thudding like a motor about to shake itself apart. Yeah, yeah, she was still pissed at him. She’ll let him know that — after he put her down safely.