Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  Which was, of course, why Peanut picked her name. Something about the spread made it insanely good to elf taste buds. Peanut claimed her real name was boring and stupid. Not that Olivia really had the right to judge; all the girls walking Liberty Avenue knew her only as Red.

  Peanut caught the male’s hand and tugged him toward the tiny dead-end alley called Mentor Way. “Let me give you a taste.”

  Olivia shook her head. It was still early morning; only a handful of dumpsters and some fading shadows would screen the two from the curious eyes. Olivia studied the distant head of the line. People seemed to be stirring a block and a half down. Had the handouts started?

  “Damn you, Peanut,” Olivia whispered. “I’m not going to starve because you were off getting boinked silly.”

  “Forgiveness.” The marine’s friends were still hovering over Olivia.

  She’d hoped that if she ignored them, they’d go away. She considered pretending not to know Elvish, but then decided she should figure out what they wanted. “Yes?”

  “Are you an adult?” the taller of the two asked.

  She considered how to answer. She had been told that no matter what, never lie to an elf. Her forged paperwork showed she was eighteen, but the truth was she was only sixteen. “Naekanain.” She fudged by pretending to not understand. “I live alone. I am one person—how do you say—my household.”

  “You’re old enough to marry?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She didn’t even have to lie for that one. It wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t “legally” married since the state of Kansas didn’t allow a man more than one wife, and a judge would have had to approve the marriage of a fifteen-year-old. She hadn’t wanted to get married in the first place.

  “Like I told you, Dart.” He pointed to Olivia. “They’re tiny even when they’re fully grown.”

  Olivia was the tallest human woman in sight, but she was still a good eight to ten inches shorter than any of the female elves.

  Dart waved off the proof. “The Wind Clan domi is smaller than this female.”

  Olivia didn’t know the meaning of the word domi. Without a doubt, though, they were debating the maturity of the girl being hailed as Princess Tinker. The girl was two years older than Olivia but six inches shorter. Even with the war on, everyone was talking about Princess Tinker. Pittsburgh’s own little Cinderella. Pictures of her were being plastered all over the city. Olivia had been surprised at how small and scruffy-looking the girl was.

  “Did you hear, Ash?” Dart said. “One-eyed thinks he can get a human female to be his domi since no elf will have him.”

  Ash laughed. “He is insane. You heard this one.” He pointed at Olivia. “Humans live alone.”

  Dart nodded. “I heard he’s been pawing all the nivasa at the Wind Clan enclave. Male and female alike. The holy ones won’t put up with that forever. Especially Thorne Scratch on Stone.”

  Olivia was relieved that the conversation had shifted off her. She wished the marines would move away. Everyone around her was obviously made just as uncomfortable by the elves’ presence and their discussion. There was a five-foot gap on either side of her.

  There was a call from down the street and the elves echoed it so it traveled up Penn Avenue.

  The two elves glanced down Mentor Way. Olivia could hear Peanut’s muffled yelping. She’d spent weeks working as a streetwalker and yet the sounds of sex still made Olivia blush.

  “Hoi! Blaze!” Ash called. “The handout is starting! Shoot your gun and get it out of that girl.”

  Olivia lifted her newspaper and pretended to read even as Peanut’s moans grew louder. The elves laughed. Out the corner of her eye, she could see that Dart was pretending to be holding a girl by the hips and thrusting into her.

  “He’s only a hundred this year,” Ash said. “I remember that age. Fucking anything on two legs that bent over for me.”

  “I’d feel like I was taking a child,” Dart said. “That girl looked sixty or seventy.”

  Ash laughed. “You idiot, humans are dead of old age at eighty. She’s probably…forty.” He’d missed Peanut’s real age by at least twenty years or more.

  “Forty?” Dart frowned at the alley. “Good gods, that’s indecent.”

  “She’s probably an adult, although it’s hard to tell with them. Blaze! Come on!”

  There was a deep male groan and then silence from the alley. A minute later, the two came out from behind a dumpster. The male was trying to refasten his pants as Peanut towed him to Olivia’s side.

  “I’m on the next street over,” Peanut was saying, pointing toward Liberty Avenue. “Come find me anytime.”

  Peanut pulled him down and kissed him hard before letting him go.

  Two consenting adults agreed to have fun together. No money was even exchanged. Still it seemed wrong for intelligent beings to be screwing in an alley like dogs. Olivia sighed, recognizing herself as a prude. A stupid trait to have considering that her survival depended on having sex with men in alleyways. Everything would be easier if she could just be more like Peanut.

  Peanut laughed. “Go ahead and say it, Red.”

  “I wish I could be more like you.”

  “No, you don’t.” Peanut caught her hand and squeezed it. “You can forgive me, but you’d hate yourself. You’ve got grit, Red, and you’re proud of it.”

  Lately it’s all she liked about herself.

  “Besides, if we get a bunch of elves trolling Liberty Avenue, maybe girls will stop being killed.” Peanut winced at the surprise on Olivia’s face. “You did hear about Cotton Candy? Right?”

  “No.” Olivia’s stomach did a sickening roll. In the last three weeks, six girls had been killed. The streetwalkers lived too close to the underbelly of the city where the oni were hiding. Only Roxy, buried in rubble when the dragon fight smashed through downtown, could have been any one of the sixty thousand humans in Pittsburgh. The other five girls were killed because they were whores working the streets, dealing with the city’s lowlifes. “What happened?”

  Peanut spread her hand. “She was up by the train station. No one saw what happened exactly. She took a shotgun to the face. They think she leaned into a car, trying to come on to the driver. She must have seen something she shouldn’t have. He was an oni or something like that.”

  Olivia’s stomach did another sickening roll. Ever since she’d lost her job at the bakery, she felt like she was slowly falling to her death. The irony was that she decided to come to Pittsburgh because it would be so hard to crawl back to her husband if things turned ugly. “I can’t keep on doing this. I need to get off the streets.”

  * * *

  Olivia had been afraid that they would be refused a share of the handout since their names weren’t on any database. She used “Red” to make it harder for police and EIA johns to check if she was a legal resident. Like most of the other streetwalkers, Peanut used her nickname for the same reason; she was the only girl willing to risk being arrested to stand in line with Olivia.

  When they reached the front of the line, they discovered that the elves in Wind Clan blue were passing out the dried beans, not the EIA as they expected. The elves weren’t concerned with official citizenship—they were only checking for magically disguised oni. They’d already found one warrior hidden with the humans; it had been dragged to the other side of the street and beheaded. The stench of fresh blood in the late summer heat made Olivia’s stomach roil.

  She fought the urge to throw up as the elves took a piece of paper with a spell written on it, pressed it to her arm, and activated it. After the magic confirmed she was as human as she looked, the elves stamped her hand bright red and weighed out her allotment of keva beans. The handout was ten pounds, measured out on scales. Olivia watched the beans spill into her canvas tote, knowing that the beans were really time. If she rationed herself to a cup a day, she could live off them for weeks. The problem was that when the beans ran out, there might not be food to buy in the stores. She needed
money now to buy what little remained before war and winter could disrupt the food supplies from the coast. Much as she wanted to stop streetwalking immediately, she should keep the beans for an emergency supply.

  “This is going to be the only handout?” she asked the Wind Clan elf that was doing the weighing.

  “Yes. Beloved Tinker domi commanded that it be given out to keep people from panicking. The next shipment will be sold to wholesalers for resale.”

  Which meant first come, first served, at whatever price the stores decided to set.

  * * *

  Wiley’s was a little mom-and-pop grocery store two blocks from her house. Olivia shopped there daily to spend all her money from the night before on what little food was left in the store. Wiley’s carried local produce and dairy, staying open while the Giant Eagle down the road had closed. Everything that was in cans and plastic containers—basically everything imported from Earth—was sold out.

  A small, refrigerated case held fresh milk and eggs. There was also butter in little canning jars. It reminded her of the ranch. With thirty mouths to feed, every day meant a new jar of butter. She hated the reminder but it couldn’t be avoided. Butter wrapped in paper came from Earth. Wiley’s got their dairy from a little farm in the South Hills.

  She winced at the prices listed on the case. Everything was twice what it cost a month ago. She checked her wallet trying not to think of what she’d done to earn the twenties inside. If she got a bottle of milk, butter and a dozen eggs, she’d have enough money left over for a bag of apples and potatoes and three zucchini. The apples and potatoes would keep if she kept them cold and dark. The zucchini would give her something other than milk and eggs to eat.

  There was a small rack of slickies in the back of the store. One of them was labeled “Princess Tinker” and “all new photos!” She picked it up and flipped the images.

  According to the slickie Tinker had invented hoverbikes and been one of the star riders on the racing circuit. One picture showed her flying around a corner of a racetrack, head-to-toe mud. Another she was standing after a race, face muddy except where the goggles had protected her eyes. There was nothing elegant or regal about her. How did she get to be a princess?

  The next page showed her about to step into a gray Rolls Royce. She wore a rich bronze-colored gown of fairy silk. A fortune of diamonds adored her throat and left wrist. A small wedge of blue marked the center of her forehead like a beauty mark. Her husband and his guards towered over her, emphasizing that she was just a tiny thing.

  Clothes, apparently, did make a princess. The caption was in Elvish, and read “Beloved Tinker Domi.”

  Was “domi” then the Elvish word for Princess? Certainly “she commanded it to be given out” suggested that Tinker was more than just a concubine. The marines had said that Forest Moss wanted a human domi because no elf would have him. Why not? And what exactly would the job entail?

  * * *

  Aiofe was in her backyard, taking down her laundry. Olivia could see the girl from her kitchen sink. She’d avoided the anthropology student since she’d found out that Aiofe was doing an internship with the EIA. The UN police force had ultimate power in Pittsburgh in regards to humans. They were the ones that deported illegal immigrants. People were saying that with Pittsburgh stranded, the original treaty with the elves was void and that the EIA no longer had any authority.

  If anyone could tell Olivia about Forest Moss, it was Aiofe. Olivia put on her librarian disguise; auburn hair twisted up into a bun and reading glasses balanced at the end of her nose. She felt vaguely guilty when Aiofe brightened at the sight of her.

  “Ah, Red! I’ve been worried about you.” Aiofe had a slight Irish lilt to her voice. “I’d been meaning to come over and knock, but your light is never on.”

  “I’m still working night shift,” Olivia partially lied. Out of habit, she joined in taking down the clothes and folding them neatly. She avoided the indecently frilly panties and bras to focus on the T-shirts sporting logos from the University of Pittsburgh. “You’re not working today?”

  “They let me go early since I’d been up all night getting things coordinated for today’s handouts. At dawn they gave me my share and told me to go home. To be truthful, I think they may be afraid that rioting might start and they didn’t want a wee Jackeen to be underfoot.”

  Unlike the elves, most of the human forces were male. Obviously the men thought that Aiofe couldn’t defend herself. Unfortunately they probably were right. While Aiofe was as tall as Olivia, she’d been an only child and gone to a girl’s school where the “contact sport” was soccer. Good little girls only learned to defend themselves when they were exposed to little boys who had been taught that roughhousing was how real men acted.

  “Everything seemed to be going well when I left,” Olivia reassured her. She liked the familiar comfort of doing chores with another woman. She’d been so lonely lately.

  “That’s Pittsburghers for you.” Aiofe shook out a towel and folded it. “They’re so used to reality standing on its head that they’re taking it all in stride. I figured that was the case and so I came on home. Can I ask you something?”

  Olivia’s heart leapt as she thought of all the questions she didn’t want asked. There were so many truths she’d been keeping from everyone. “What is it?”

  “How do you grow beans? I was thinking of planting some of what they gave me.”

  Olivia laughed in surprise and relief. “You can’t grow those keva beans now.”

  Confusion filled Aiofe’s face. “Aren’t dried beans just the seeds of bean plants? Why can’t I put them in the ground and have them grow?”

  “We’re less than a month from first frost.”

  “What’s that?” Like Olivia, Aiofe had no family and her college friends had been on summer break when the war broke out. The girl was only marginally better off than Olivia in that she had a respectable job translating for the EIA, but there were times she seemed dangerously young and naïve.

  “When it drops below freezing, most plants die. In Pittsburgh, the first frost is usually mid-October. That’s why the leaves are starting to turn.” Olivia pointed to the sugar maple that straddled their backyards. The edges of its leaves were tinged with yellow. It served as a reminder that despite the late summer heat, autumn was officially only days away.

  “I know why the leaves change,” Aiofe complained. “I just don’t know anything about growing stuff. I was born in the farming country of Whites Cross Ireland but we moved to a flat on College Green in Dublin when I was little. I don’t know these things. Food always comes from the market.”

  “I don’t know how long keva beans take to mature but they seem a lot like kidney beans and those take three or four months to grow. If we’d planted some back at the start of the war, then maybe there’d have been time, but now is too late. You’d just waste your beans.”

  Aiofe blew a raspberry out. “The story of this war.” She threw her hands up in the air and waved a pair of red silk panties in the air. “Yay.” She dropped her hands. “Boo.”

  “Huh?”

  Aiofe tossed the panties into her plastic laundry basket. “Oh, the elves haven’t allowed humans to travel out of Pittsburgh, so everything we knew about them was what we could learn from the ones here. They were all Wind Clan beholden to the viceroy because he owned this half of the continent. With the oni invasion, though, he had to call on the other clans for reinforcements. Yay! We have this massive flood of new information.” Aiofe waved a black pair of panties this time. “Boo! Pitt is a ghost town because we were on summer break. None of the anthropology professors are on Elfhome. It’s only me and five other grad students with internships here in Pittsburgh. We’re taking notes like crazy.”

  “The Fire Clan and the Stone Clan?”

  Aiofe nodded, plucking down her bright underwear with no outward sign of embarrassment. “The Fire Clan is here as a neutral party because the queen sent them. From what we’ve been able to ga
ther, she’s the only one with a true standing army. It’s a force that she normally uses for peacekeeping missions between the various clans. They’re not getting anything out of the war except keeping Elfhome safe from invasion. The Stone Clan sent a small mercenary force and the Wind Clan is paying for the mercenaries’ help. That’s the tale, cut and dried, but every day we’re learning all sorts about the political nastiness between the clans. Yay!” She threw her hands up in the air. “Only Pittsburgh is now in the middle of it.” She dropped her hands with a sigh. “Boo.”

  “Forest Moss. What’s the story with him? What happened to his eye?”

  Aiofe scooped up her basket and nodded toward her backdoor to indicate that Olivia should follow her in. “What we didn’t know until recently was that the oni and the elves went to war before. Apparently all three planets had ways to go through caves to get from one to the other with Earth smack in the middle. Forest Moss and his household were the first elves to find Onihida. That’s the oni’s world. The oni took them prisoner and tortured them all, trying to find out how to get to Elfhome. They tied Forest Moss down and burned his eye out. He’s the only one that survived.”

  Olivia shivered as she thought of the sunburst of scars circling Forest Moss’ empty socket. How long did they burn him with hot knives before they actually plunged the tip into his eye? Were there more scars hidden by his clothes? “Is he really crazy?”

  “He’s not the full shilling, as my da would say.”

  Aiofe hadn’t prepared for winter yet, so her kitchen seemed spacious and airy. She’d spent her spare time painting the walls butter yellow and putting up crisp white curtains instead of bracing for freezing winds and a possible loss of electricity or gas. The kitchen table was doubling as a desk, overflowing with actual paper books, newspapers, datapads and slickies. Aiofe obviously trusted the EIA and the elves to keep Pittsburgh functioning until the peaceful end of the war. Olivia glanced about, feeling guilty that she hadn’t taken the girl under her wing and shown her how to prepare her place. Olivia wasn’t even sure that Aiofe would take her suggestions; she was nearly five years younger than the grad student. She probably would think Olivia’s mistrust of the government was hopelessly militant redneck.