by Baen Books
"Come on, Brisbane, we've got a house to check out." She tugged on her Pirate's baseball cap. "And maybe a game of ball to play."
She got out a turnip and her bat and off they went.
No one answered her polite knock. The door wasn't locked. She swung it cautiously open.
The house had never been finished before the first Startup. Rough framed stairs lead upward without any nod towards safety. The ceilings were just studs. The walls were unpainted drywall. With the windows boarded over, the building was a dark cave, the sunlight from the doorway the only light.
Brisbane trundled in.
"Brizzy!" Law whispered.
The problem with a fearless pet was he went where he wanted to go, which wasn't always the same place she wanted to be. He didn't come back when she called, which meant he probably could smell something he wanted to eat.
Law hissed a curse. There didn't seem to be anyone in the house. "Hello?" And then considering she was sent to locate someone with an elf-sounding name, she added in, "Sekia?"
She should have brought a flashlight. After a morning of sun reflecting off water, she felt blind in the cave-like dark. She took out her phone and shone it into the darkness. "Sekia?" And then in English. "Is anyone here?"
Brisbane muttered from somewhere deep in the house. He'd found something to eat but couldn't get to it. There would be no calling him back.
Sighing, she crept forward, panning her phone's light left to right. The house was one of these "open floor plans" that equated into three big rooms downstairs, connected together via large archways. There seemed to be some light shining in the back of the house. "Seriously, Law, why do you keep getting mixed up in shit like this? You don't know even if there's a girl…"
A shadow crossing through the slant of light from the door made her spin around. She couldn't tell what had cast the shadow. She couldn't see anyone. She hadn't heard any footsteps.
"Hello?" she called louder in Elvish. "Snow? This place is not safe." Her high school Elvish classes never covered situations like this. She used Elvish when selling to the enclaves at the Rim but usually the conversations were limited to food, time, money and the weather. Can you get me fish tomorrow? No, you cannot eat my porcupine.
There was a whisper in the darkness to the right of the doorway. As Law stared into the darkness, her eyes slowly adjusted until she could see someone standing there. Somehow she hadn't seen the person tucked into the shadows.
"Hello? Nicadae!" Law tried for cheerful while tightening her hold on the baseball bat. "Sekia?"
"Sekia." A soft confused female voice echoed and continued in Elvish. "Who are you?"
"Law." She patted her chest. She hated her full name but elves complained that her name was way too short. "Lawry Munroe. Who are you?"
The figure moved forward into the light. The female was smaller than Law expected. Her baby doll dress of white fairy silk managed to be very demure for how stunningly short it was. Black curls spilling down her back, nothing like the impossibly straight controlled hair that Law associated with elves. Bare feet. The female pressed a hand to her chest and spilled out High Elvish in a flood.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Law cried in English. "Naekanin." The one Elvish phrase that was useful for all occasions: I don't understand. Law was fairly fluent in Low Elvish; she had to be to trade with the elves. High Elvish, though, was a whole different language. "Are you Snow?" She pretended to shiver. "Snow? You?"
That got a long, uncertain look.
"Okay." Law scratched at her back with the baseball bat. She reasoned out the logic of her problem in English. "Crazy Lady got: Fairywood, white door, female. Let's say it’s a given that someone is coming to kill any female behind the white door, regardless if you're actually Snow or not."
"Naekanin," Snow said slowly—assuming this was actually Snow.
Law simplified. "We have to go." Then realized she'd said it in English. She repeated it in Elvish and used the "come here" hand wave that elves used.
"We have to go." The female echoed the English but she turned and headed deeper into the house.
Law threw up her hands in frustration and chased after the elf.
Off the unfinished kitchen was an area that probably would have been the mudroom. A spell light illuminated the small rough area. Brisbane was rooting through a pile of travel sacks, grumbling at the fact that he couldn't get to whatever attracted him.
"Brizzy!" Law whistled and held out the turnip. "Come on. We have to go."
The elf gathered up her travel sacks. The look she gave the cavelike kitchen was clear enough—whatever the reason she was there, she didn't like the place. She was perfectly willing to pack up and abandon it, even if the ride came with a porcupine.
The elf's hair was blue black.
Out in the sun, it was really beautiful. Glossy, loose waves fell down to her hips, coal-black but with subtle dark blue highlights. Human women would either pay hundreds of dollars or sign a pact with a devil for such hair. Her skin was the flawless pale, pale white of elves, even her bare feet. She had long athletic legs. The fruffy baby doll dress of white silk covered all the naughty bits—barely. Her eyes weren't the vivid blue almost every elf Law ever met had but a deep stormy gray, the color of thunderclouds.
That said, she looked like she hadn't slept for days, and her beautiful eyes were red from crying. But far from being despondent, she explored the Dodge with great interest. She pushed all the buttons, cranked the window up and down and up and down and turned the radio on and off. When she found the maps in Law's glovebox, she gave a happy cry.
Brisbane wanted into the elf's travel sacks and wouldn't leave the sacks alone even for the turnip. Once Law explained that the porcupine stubbornness, Snow produced a saenori out of the packs. The peachlike fruit wouldn't be ripe in Pittsburgh for another month. It meant that Snow had probably recently come from the Easternlands, where Elvish settlements were farther south than those in the Westernlands.
Law's phone rang with Crazy Lady's number again. Law accepted the call and said, "I found her. I think. I found a female elf. I'm not sure what her name…"
Crazy Lady cut her off with, "Did you get the door?"
"The door?" Law echoed in confusion.
"The white door," Crazy Lady said. "Get it and take it with you."
"Really?" Law was running late and running out of patience.
"People will die if you don't get this right," Crazy Lady stated calmly. "Probably starting with you."
"I'm getting the door."
A quart of white exterior paint was just inside the door still with a Wollerton's price tag and an uncleaned paintbrush dried to a solid slab of white. Both looked brand new. The door, though, obviously had hung in place for years. Luckily she had a cordless screwdriver. Dr. Who would approve. After she stowed the door in the back of her pickup, she nabbed the paint can, too.
She wanted to shortcut through Windgap and McKees Rock to get to downtown. It turned out to be harder than she expected. After the third "fallen" tree, it was obvious that someone had recently used magic to block the streets. Anyone entering the area would be funneled straight to the house where Snow had been. But why?
She was trying to decide whether to backtrack or go cross-country, when her phone rang again. This time it was her mom. Her monkeys. Her circus.
Sighing, Law answered the call. "Hello, Mother."
"Twenty-two years I've been telling you to call me Flo."
"You're my mother—or at least, that's what my birth certificate claims."
"You've checked?"
"Multiple times." She kept hoping it was some kind of mistake. Since her mother had saddled her with a boy's name, she'd gone as far as getting a copy of her birth certificate from the city. The paperwork ruled out adoption but not switched at birth. The mirror, however, said that was impossible. The older she got, the more she looked like her paternal grandfather; a fact that made neither one of them happy since he had never approved of her mother.
"What is it, Mother? I'm busy."
"People with real jobs are busy. People that play around and call it work are not."
"Mother, we are not having this discussion again."
"We will continue having this conversation until you realize that you are wasting your life. But that's not why I called."
"It's not?" Law held out the phone to eye it with suspicion. Her mother rarely passed up the opportunity to beat the job thing into the ground.
"You will never guess what just showed up at the Scheidemantles' this morning."
"Who?'
"The Scheidemantles. They live down the road, across from Ginny Czernowski."
"I thought she got married."
"If I said Virginia Mary Elizabeth Frankenwald, you wouldn't know who I was talking about." And people said elves had long complicated names. "She married an accountant that she met in college. They moved into the Donaldson's old place. They had a little girl last week. They named her Mercy."
With every life accomplishment that her mother listed for her classmate, Law knew that what she really was ticking off were things that Law was lacking in her life. A college education on Earth. A job as a dental hygienist. An accountant husband. Home ownership. Children.
Law had no interest in any of that—especially the whole dental hygienist thing. If you were going to school for something, why pick something that required you sticking your hands in other people's mouths all day?
"Mother, why are you calling me?"
Her mother huffed. "A moving van showed up at the Scheidemantles this morning. They're are moving back to Earth!"
"And?"
"They have that lovely Cape Cod. It's a four bed—"
"No."
"You can't keep living in that drafty old barn."
"Yes, I can."
"You're going to freeze to death one of the winters."
Law knew from experience that her mother wouldn't listen to any of the sane, logical reasons why she picked the barn, starting with it was as far as possible from her mother as she could live in Pittsburgh. There was no way she would choose a house just down the street from her. "I have a Tarzan swing in my living room."
And her mother hung up on her.
"Let me get this straight." Ellen McMicking was a customer and good friend. She shared many of Law's views on how to live one's life. She owned two gypsy caravans. One was home to her and her three-legged bobcat, Rigel. (Cool, unusual home: check. Odd pet: check.) The other caravan was set up as a food truck. (Own boss: check.) Normally she parked at the Library light rail station's vast parking lot. The day before Shutdown, though, she'd moved them into an empty lot in the Strip District. "You stole an elf and a door?"
"I did not steal her!" Law set up her scales while Ellen lined up her coolers. Said elf was in Ellen's little house, eating a second round of breakfast as if she hadn't had food for week. The steel-cut hot oatmeal with warm berry compote was simply delicious but Law couldn't imagine having a second big bowl. (By now, though, Snow probably was getting the impression that all humans had very odd pets.) "You don't steal people! You steal things like—"
"Doors?"
"Yes." Law was unrepentant about stealing the door; the house had obviously been abandoned years ago. A quick coat of paint did not establish ownership in her book.
"So you kidnapped her?"
"No! She came with me willingly enough." Still, the female seemed slightly leery, deflecting direct questions with a continuous barrage of questions of her own. The thirty-minute ride into town had been one "What's this?" after another. Yet she hadn't asked for help or to be taken any place or to anyone.
Ellen giggled, having entirely too much fun with the situation. "Only you, Lawry, would get yourself into this kind of mess."
"You didn't find it so funny when it was you that I was bailing out of trouble."
Ellen pressed both hands to her chest. "And I'm eternally grateful to you. Oh, those look lovely." She cooed at the waewaeli. "I'm going to honey-fry them."
"Fish and chips?"
Ellen sighed. "No chips. My potato supplier from stateside let me down last Shutdown and even if he gets me some this one, I won't have time to prep them. I've spent the last three days making bread. I'm going with sandwiches. I will have parmesan zucchini fries for the adventurous."
"Sounds good to me."
"Yes, but you're adventurous."
"Most Pittsburghers will eat anything that doesn't try to eat them first."
"Yes, but it’s the truck drivers from Earth whose rigs are being unloaded that have the time and cash to blow. Please tell me that I can have this whole cooler."
"It's yours." Law was glad she caught the last fish.
They weighed out the fish, transferring them to Ellen's ice chests. Ellen was buying a dozen of the waewaeli that weighed in at two hundred and thirty-two pounds. At two dollars a pound, it came out to a little under five hundred dollars. A very good morning's work once she expensed out the cost of gasoline. If she could do it every day of the year, she'd be rich. Ellen, however, could only afford to buy this much once a month for Shutdown. Any other day, she bought one or two fish. Nor could Law hope for safe fishing in the winter when the streams ran deep enough for the man-eating bigger fish to navigate.
"You don't know who it was that called you?" Ellen asked.
"I just have a number."
"You didn't think to ask?"
"I asked, she didn't say."
Ellen plunged her hands into ice water and then wiped them clean. She took out her phone. "What's the number?"
"It's on my call list." Law turned her hip toward Ellen.
"Is this your way to get me to feel you up?"
"Will that work?"
Ellen slapped her shoulder and got Law's phone out of her front pocket without unnecessary (disappointingly so) groping. (Played for the opposite team: no check.)
"You calling her?" Law asked. It was her experience that you never got direct answers from crazy people.
"No, I'm back tracing her number. The joys of having geeky friends is that they give you wonderful apps. Widget gave me a reverse number look up program when she helped me with my bookkeeping software. Oh. Gee."
"What?"
"That's a payphone in Market Square."
Either Crazy Lady didn't have a phone, or she didn't want anyone to trace the call back to her. Law suspected it was the latter. "Tricky."
"What are you going to do now?"
All girls that Law helped usually asked—if not with words, with a desperate look—for Law to bail them out of trouble. As soon as the girls were tucked someplace safe, they spilled out their story. Not all the details—usually they were ashamed of their weaknesses—but at least who the hell they were running from. It was possible that the mystery caller knew something that Snow didn't. Maybe Snow didn't even know she was in trouble. (Although the fact that she had dodged all the basic questions seemed to indicate she did.)
It was possible that Snow didn't trust Law simply because she was a human. Elves came to Pittsburgh via the train. The station was downtown, surrounded by skyscrapers. The enclaves where most elves lived were at the Rim, uphill nearly three miles. The most likely scenario was that Snow had been grabbed and taken by humans before she ever gotten to the safety of the enclaves.
"I need to sell the rest of my fish. I might as well take her out to the Rim; see if she belongs out there."
It was less than twelve hours to Shutdown and the city hummed with activity. The EIA troops were heading out to the border checkpoints. The Pittsburgh Police were going into Nazi-mode and towing anyone that illegally parked. The shops downtown and the Strip District were preparing for a massive horde of trucks to pull up and deliver an entire month's worth of goods. Families wanting first dibs on rare big-ticket items were drifting in. In every abandoned lot and empty warehouse food stands like Ellen's were preparing to feed the incoming masses. Across the street, Gene Thompson had pulled in with his BBQ chicken truck
, complete with trailer rigged as a wood-burning fire pit. Gene was splitting hickory with an axe and smoke already scented the air.
She checked her truck just the same as if she'd left it parked on an abandoned, weed-choked lot instead of a city block. She banged on the side panels to frighten out small mammals and heat-seeking snakes. She carefully popped the hood and scanned over the engine to make sure no rats had chewed through hoses or belts. She took a few steps back, knelt and scanned under her pickup, looking for the telltale gleam of eyes or brake fluid on the pavement. She opened the driver's door and scanned the cabin to make sure there was nothing up in the dash, under the seat, or behind it.
Bare Snow had been through the routine at Fairywood. She helped look although it wasn't clear the elf knew what they were searching for. Newly arrived humans always teased Law for her caution but they'd never found themselves suddenly sharing a cab with a two-foot wide spider while going sixty miles per hour. (Luckily the steel spinner had frightened Brisbane as badly as it scared Law and it was instantly a pincushion nailed to the dashboard.)
Brisbane ignored the precautions and climbed up into the cab with his usual disdain.
Law was not one to give credit to rumors. People liked to talk. Just because they ran out of facts didn't stop the mouth from flapping. It always amazed her that people who had never set foot in one of the elf enclaves could go on and on about what supposedly went on behind the high stone walls.
She delivered to the side door that gave access to the motor court, instead of the front door that lead to the public dining areas. Technically, the area was more enclosed than the restaurant part of the enclave. The elves, though, were less careful with the doors and what they said.
Over time it had become obvious to Law that the enclaves operated as tiny little city-states, allied but fiercely competitive. Each had an orchard within the forbidden center courtyard, extensive raised vegetable beds, greenhouses, chicken coops and small herds of indi. While humans might gossip about how the enclaves were nothing more than thinly disguised brothels, they were in fact, cutthroat restaurateurs. If Law sold trout to Caraway's enclave, she would need to sell crayfish to Poppymeadow's. It played into some odd "you're one of us" mindset that the elves had. She was "their" supplier only if she gave them exclusive stock.