by Wen Spencer
The tengu kids took the loft bed and Tinker settled by the door, her back to the wall so she could keep an eye on them. Keiko continued to stare at her. Mickey swung his legs. Dusk fell on the forest and darkness crawled into the cabin.
"How far does Riki have to go?"
Mickey started to say something but Keiko poked him.
"We're not allowed to say."
"What are you doing so far away anyhow?"
"Joey just got his wings," Mickey said. "We were on his first long flight and got cut off by a troop of oni moving through the area. We tried to go around them and got lost. When we hit the city's edge, Keiko said we should call Riki. I'm the one that remembered the number."
"Then all you would do was cry," Keiko said.
Mickey pulled up his legs, curling into himself.
Keiko gave him a look of remorse and then swung down. She rummaged through the shelves and then handed up a bottle of water and a power bar to her younger cousin. "Here. You can have the last chocolate one."
Keiko put a second bottle and bar up beside Mickey. Wordlessly, she left an offering of food and water for Tinker down on the floor, carefully staying outside of Tinker's reach, and then swung back to the loft.
Tinker hadn't had a power bar as an elf—she expected something tasteless. She was surprised how good it tasted. "Oh, these are yummy."
Mickey nodded in agreement, made instantly happy by Keiko's offering. "I didn't think elves could speak English."
Keiko pinched Mickey.
"Ow! What?"
"Don't display how ignorant you are. She was a human until the viceroy turned her into an elf a few months ago."
Mickey looked at Tinker, recognition dawning on him. "Oh, she's the Dufae girl?"
"Yes," Keiko said.
Fear filled Mickey's face.
"Why are you scared of me?" Tinker asked.
"We know what Riki had to do to you," Mickey whispered. "How he had to turn you over to the oni."
"Riki didn't want us to come to Elfhome," Keiko said. "He said that either the elves would find us, or the oni would. Better stay on Earth where we were at least free. But the oni came to our house and took Joey hostage. Riki sent us on ahead to be with our aunt, but he stayed to work for the oni—to try and get Joey back."
"He never told me about you."
"If he told you, then the kitsune would know, and then the oni would know. He couldn't tell you the truth about anything—or he'd put us in danger."
"You hate the tengu now—don't you?" Mickey whispered.
A few days ago, Tinker probably would have said yes. She knew that when she found the MP3 player, she'd been angry enough to beat Riki to a pulp again. Now, with the dead in Chinatown, and the children looking at her in fear, she couldn't hate all the innocent strangers. "No."
Keiko scoffed, disbelieving. "I'd never forgive anyone that did that to me."
"I saw what Lord Tomtom did to those that failed him—and it scared the living shit out of me." She shuddered with the memory of the torture; the flash of bright blades and white of bone stripped clean of flesh. "I was willing to do almost anything to keep the knives away from me."
"So you forgive Riki?"
There was something about the darkness that demanded honesty. "I'm still angry at him. But I was with the oni for nearly a month—I can understand why he did it and don't think I can hate him for it. He took my shit and never complained, and when he could, he protected me."
There was a sudden roar outside and a hoverbike—lift engines at full—popped up and landed on the massive branch outside the door. Its headlight flooded the room with stark white blinding light.
Tinker stood and called magic, wrapping the wind around her.
"Tinker domi!" Stormsong's voice came out of the light.
"Stormsong?" Tinker squinted into the glare.
The headlight snapped off. Stormsong sat on a custom Delta Tinker had done for a charity auction last year. Somehow Stormsong had managed to land and balance on the branch—it was going to take work to get it down in one piece. In her right hand the sekasha held a shotgun resting across the handlebars and trained at the cabin door.
"How the hell did you find me?" Tinker asked.
"I closed my eyes and went where I was needed." Stormsong glanced beyond Tinker to the kids. "They're tengu."
Tinker realized that her being safe meant the kids were now in danger. "I promised that they wouldn't be hurt."
"That was a silly thing to do," Stormsong said.
"They're just kids." Tinker moved to protect them with her shield.
"Kids grow up," Stormsong said.
Tinker shook her head. "I can't let you hurt them. I promised."
"Yes, Tinker ze domi," Stormsong said in High Tongue.
Tinker released the winds. The kids huddled against the back corner of the loft bed.
"We won't hurt you," she told them, "but I need to leave."
"Hey," Keiko called. She pulled off a necklace and scrambled forward to dangle it out to Tinker. "Take this. It will protect you."
"From what?"
"Tengu."
Tinker looped the necklace over her neck and picked her way out onto the branch. "How the hell did you get a hoverbike the whole way up here? I know the lift engine can't do a hundred feet straight up—or down."
"Flying blind." Stormsong uncocked her shotgun and holstered it. "Hang tight to me—this is going to be tricky. And you might want to close your eyes."
Tinker clung tight to Stormsong, trying to let her trust of the bodyguard override her knowledge of the hoverbike's limitations. Stormsong didn't even turn on the bike's headlight, just raced the bike's engine and then tipped them over the edge. A squeak of fear leapt up Tinker's throat—followed by her heart—as they nose-dived. They hit a lower branch that cracked under the lift drive and suddenly they were corkscrewing madly. She gripped Stormsong tight. She felt more than saw the blur of tree trunks and branches as they kissed off them. Seconds later they straightened out and roared through the darkness—Pony on a second hoverbike waiting on the ground running alongside them.
"Thank you," Stormsong called back.
"What for? You rescued me."
"Yes, but you trusted me to do my job."
18: SEEK YOU
The sekasha suggested a bath and bed, but Tinker didn't want to unwind and take it easy. Things in Pittsburgh were bad, and getting worse, and like it or not, she was one of the few people who had the power to fix things. The only question was how.
She placated the sekasha by agreeing to dinner and took her datapad with her to the enclave's private dining hall. Maynard thought that opening a line of communication with Earth would be key. Yeah, right, just phone home. Riki had said that the dragon was the wizard of Oz, and implied that dragons understood how to move from world to world. She didn't know where the dragon was, however, and from the sounds of it, both the oni and tengu were searching hard for it. Follow the yellow brick road? What road? Ohio River Boulevard? I-279? The last lead she had was the black willow tree and last she saw of that, it was flambé.
Wait, she had seeds from the black willow. At least, she thought she did. She had Windwolf's staff track the small jar down, and the MP3 player. Watching the seeds wriggle in the glass, she listened to the songs recorded on the player. It was one of Oilcan's favorite elf rock groups, playing a collection of songs that her cousin had written for them. If you didn't know Oilcan, the songs seemed to be about lost lovers. Tinker knew that they were about his mother. Odd how the words could stay the same but knowledge changed the meaning.
Tinker laid her head on the table and remembered Riki in another light.
Pony ran his hand across her back, a delicious feeling that uncoiled a sudden deep need. On the heels of that, like cracking open a bottle full of dark storm winds, a confusing wash of emotions.
"Don't do that." Tinker shifted away from his touch and tried to cork the bottle. She was too fragile for that.
&nbs
p; "Have I hurt you?" Pony asked.
She shook her head.
"All day, you have avoided me as if I had. I need to understand—what have I done wrong? We are not fitting this way."
She had? She hadn't even been aware of it. "It's not you. It's me. I-I've so totally—" Unfortunately there wasn't an Elvish match for "'fucked up," so she stuck in the English, "everything and everyone."
"Fuck," Pony repeated the English curse. "Can you teach me that?"
"No!" She realized he meant the word's meaning, not the actual action. "It means intercourse." And once she saw the confusion in Pony's face as he tried to plug in the meaning into her sentence, she added, "It's a curse word generally meaning—well—anything you want it to mean. It's one of the more versatile words we have."
"How do you conjugate it?"
"Fuck, fucking, fucked when used as a verb. It can be used as a noun, indicate a person, place, or thing, generally derogatory." This was the not the conversation she thought she'd be having with Pony this evening. "It could also be combined—creatively—with other words. Fuckhead. Fuck off. Fuckwad."
"I'm starting to understand a little more about human fascination with sex."
"Besides the fact that it's so damn fun?"
"What is damn?"
"Pony!"
"I feel that it is time that I learned English."
She felt a pang of guilt knowing that Pony hadn't understood any of Nathan's last words, that he had only seen her struggling in Nathan's hold and her cry for help. "Yes, that would be good."
"Why do you feel this way? That you have 'fucked up'? You have done the best you can against very difficult situations."
"Pittsburgh is stuck here on Elfhome. Nathan is dead. Half the people I know probably hate my guts now. I'm not sure even Oilcan or Lain will ever want to see me again. I cheated on my husband, and seduced you! How is that 'the best'? Gods forbid if I had done my worst!"
He reached out and pulled her back, into his lap.
"Pony." She wriggled, trying to escape him.
"Domi," he whispered into her hair, his lips brushing the tips of her ears, sending a shiver of want through her. "Have I no will of my own? Am I your puppet?"
She stared into his dark eyes and felt cold dread take hold. "I don't want to talk about this."
"Because if you're in control, I am not to blame for my actions?"
"Pony, please."
"And if I am not under your control, does that make me a terrifying stranger? Someone that you do not know?"
She clung to him then, afraid that he would slip away from her. "Please, Pony, you're the only thing sane about my life right now."
"You are being unfair to both of us to say that what happened was only by your hand. I am not your puppet. You did not act alone. You can not be solely responsible."
"You do what I tell you to do. I told you I wanted sex and you gave it to me."
"I choose to do what you tell me." He took her hand and nuzzled her wrist. "I was pleased that you trusted me enough to turn to me and to stop when you changed your mind."
"I'm just supposed to use you? Get off and then throw you across the room? Like you're some kind of—" She was going to say "vibrator" but elves didn't have a word for battery-operated sex toys. Nor did she want to hurt him more by being crude. "—substitute for my husband?"
"That is what I am. I am to be here for you when Wolf cannot be."
"But—But— And you're okay with that?"
"I have lived my entire life knowing that as a sekasha, if I became a domi's beholden, she might take me to bed. And I knew, when I offered myself to you, that meant all of me. My life is yours. My love is yours. And I have watched you fight the demon spawn themselves to keep me from harm. Nothing happened yesterday that I did not know might happen, that I wanted to stop, and that I am sorry about—except the part about being thrown across the room."
If he thought this was going to make her feel better, he was wrong. She felt worse, and struggled to keep from showing it. Obviously she sucked at it as sadness filled his eyes.
"I did not realize until Stormsong explained that humans are so—singular—with their love. It is not our way." Pony used the inclusive "our," meaning that they both belonged to it: she was one of them. "That is why we sekasha are naekuna; so you can turn to us if you need us."
"Oh, Pony, I might have the body of an elf, but in here—" She tapped her temple. "I'm still a human. I can't commit to one person—heart and soul—and then take another one to bed, without feeling like I'm doing something wrong. I just can't."
"I know." He said it with quiet acceptance in his voice, and then nothing more. After a minute, she leaned against him and soaked in his calmness. It still felt wrong to stay so close, so intimate with him when she was married to Windwolf. Her logical side, though, was starting to recognize what Pony must know—that while she was emotionally fully human now, that in a hundred years or so, she would slowly grow to be elf inside as well as out. And to elves—a hundred years was a very short time.
Well, sitting wallowing in her own pain wasn't going to help Pittsburgh. Time to pull rabbits out of her butt. How could she communicate across realities when Earth wouldn't have a receiver for her transmitter? She'd already tested Turtle Creek for radio waves, and nothing recognizable was coming through. She entertained the idea of linking two phones together with a phone line and tossing one into the Discontinuity. No, a phone would sink like the gate had. So would messages in bottles.
She sighed and slid out of Pony's lap. "Time to get busy. I need to do some modeling."
Communication with Earth was a simple science problem. What was happening in Pittsburgh was a vast sociological problem that she didn't know how to solve. She didn't even know where she stood in regards to it. How far did her responsibility extend? Were the elves right in hunting down all the oni and killing them? The scientist in her could see the simple logic of it. Both races were immortal, only the oni were prolific and the elves weren't. If the elves did nothing, the oni would win eventually by default. Morally, genocide was wrong—but did the elves have a choice? It wasn't like the gods had put both races on one world. The oni had invaded, which put them in the wrong. It would be stupid to put them in the right simply because they failed to kill the elves first.
And what about the tengu, who seemed to be a race separate from the oni and on Elfhome against their will? What was her responsibility to them? Riki had betrayed her, but if the tengu children were telling the truth, he had been forced to choose between her and his cousins. She knew she would move the world to protect Oilcan; how could she hold Riki's betrayal against him when that meant putting the children in danger?
And how many tengu were there on Elfhome? Would she be protecting Riki, the three kids and the unnamed "aunt" or were there more? A dozen? A hundred?
Where did her responsibility begin and end? Could she protect all the humans and the tengu too? Or to keep the humans safe, would she have to ignore what was morally right?
And under it all was the dark suspicion that she didn't really have the power to protect anything, despite what Tooloo might think. True Flame thought she was a useless child. The Stone Clan was trying to kill her. Windwolf had lent her his power, but if she took a stand against him, would he take it back?
When Wolf asked Tinker to be his domi, he'd suspected that she would be able to lead. Certainly, when she spoke, people obeyed. She didn't seem to be aware that she had the quality, but the day she saved his life, everyone listened to her without quarreling. Time and time again since then there had been satisfying—although usually mystifying—proof that he was right about her. He found his domi deep in another mysterious project in the middle of the Westinghouse Bridge, overlooking the Ghostlands.
"What is this?" Wolf pointed to a large cylindrical machine beside his domi.
"This is an Imperial searchlight." Tinker patted the three-foot-tall light fixture. "It uses a Xenon 4,000-watt bulb to output 155,000 lumens.
They say that the output is visible at distances of more than twenty kilometers."
Wolf eyed the wires snaking away to either end of the bridge. "Do you have more than one?"
"Three. I tried to get four, but these babies are hard to find in Pittsburgh—and a bitch to move. They weigh nearly two hundred pounds and then you need almost four hundred pounds of ballast so they don't tip over. I put the other two on either hill to get maximum spread."
Tinker settled at the table at the center of the bridge. "I've got them tied together to this control board. I'm trying to track down a manual on—" She paused to eye her screen closely. "Ah, there, Morse code."