by Wen Spencer
But now, as a domana, she could see magic. The door swung open to reveal a room filled with the shimmer of power.
"Sweet gods," she breathed, earning a surprised look from Wojo and making the sekasha move closer to her.
The magic flowed at a purple on the far end of the visible spectrum, lighting the floor to such near-invisible intensity that it brought tears to her eyes. The high ceiling absorbed most of that light, so it stayed cloaked in shifting shadows. Heat spilled out of the room, flushing her to fever hot, and seconds later, the sense of lightness seeped up her legs, slowly filling her until she felt like she would float away.
"What?" Wojo asked.
"It's a very strong ley line," Tinker said.
Wojo made a slight surprised hrumpf to this.
She considered what she was wearing. An active spell with this much force behind it, snarled by something metal on her, could be deadly. She wasn't sure how dangerous this much latent magic might pose. "You might want to empty your pockets."
She pulled off her boots, emptied her pockets into them, and took off her gun belt. Since the sekasha caste couldn't sense magic, she told Pony and Stormsong, "This ley seems almost as strong as the spell stones."
"The shrine indicates a fiutana," Pony explained. "Like the one that the spell stones are built on."
"What's that?" Tinker asked.
Pony explained, "A single point where magic is much stronger than normal, welling up, like spring waters."
"If you're coming in," she told the two warriors, "strip off all metal. And I mean all."
The sekasha started paper, scissors, stone to see which was going in, and which would stay behind with the weapons.
There was a light switch by the door; Tinker cautiously flipped it on, but nothing happened.
"Lightbulbs pop as soon as you carry them into the room," Wojo explained, "so we stopped installing them."
"We need a light source shielded from magic." Tinker flipped the switch back to off. "I don't think even a plastic flashlight would work."
"No, they pop too." Wojo took out two spell lights and held out one to her. "These are safe, but you'll want to watch—they're really bright."
With this much magic around, that wasn't surprising.
She wrapped her hand tight around the cool glass orb before activating it. Her fingers gleamed dull red, her bones lines of darkness inside her skin. Carefully, she uncovered a fraction of the orb, and light shafted out a painfully brilliant white.
Stormsong won paper, scissors, stone and opted for coming inside. She ghosted into the room ahead of Tinker, her shields outlining her in blue brilliance, her wooden sword ready. Tinker waited for Stormsong to flash the "all clear" signal before entering the warehouse.
The cement floor was rough and warm under her stocking feet. She walked into the room, feeling like she should be wading. It lacked the resistance of water, but she could sense a current, a slow circular flow, and a depth.
Wojo followed, oblivious to magic. "This is the space. Is it big enough? If we can get the refrigerator unit to work?"
Tinker considered the loading dock, the wide door, and the large room. They would have to transfer the tree from the flatbed to something wheeled, then shift both back onto the flatbed to get the tree up to the loading dock height and still be able to shift it into the cooler. Given that they'd have to fit a forklift in to help with the transfer, it would be a tight fit, but certainly doable.
"Yeah, this will do." Of course they would have to drain off the massive excess of magic. Strong magic and heavy machinery did not mix well. "You had the cooling unit running for, what, ten years? I'm surprised you managed to keep it running that long."
"More like fourteen," Wojo said. "Your grandfather, actually, came over just after Startup and set us up so it worked fine for years. It didn't break down until after he died."
The machine room was off the back of the refrigerated room, through a regular-sized door in the insulated wall. The compressor itself was normal. The cement around it, however, had been inscribed with a spell. A section had overloaded, burning out a part of the spell. She'd never seen anything like it.
"My grandfather did this?" Tinker asked.
"Yes." Wojo nodded. "He heard about the trouble we were having and volunteered to fix it. We were a little skeptical. Back then, no one knew anything about working magic. People are picking magic up, but still, no one had a clue how to fix what he did when it broke."
Tinker's family had the edge that they were descended from an elf who had been trapped on Earth. Her father, Leonardo Dufae, developed his hyperphase gate based off the quantum nature of magic after studying the family's codex. It was the main reason Tinker had been able to build a gate when no one on Earth had yet figured out how to copy her father's work.
"Define wacky," Tinker asked.
"What?" Wojo said.
"You said that it went wacky after the first Startup."
"Ah, well, the compressor seemed to work like a pump. The magic was so thick that you could see it. It blew every lightbulb on the block. The forklifts kept burning out but then they'd skitter across the room, just inches off the floor. Loose paper would crawl up your leg like a kitten. It was just weird."
Yes, that fell under wacky. She knew that the electric forklifts had engines that could short to form a crude antigravity spell—it was what had given her the idea for hoverbikes. The loose paper was new. Perhaps they had something printed on them that had animated them.
"We finally just shut it down and gave all the ice cream to the queen's army." Wojo waved his hand to illustrate emptying out the vast storage area. "Kind of an icebreaker—pardon the pun. A thousand gallons of the cookie batter, chocolate fudge, and peanut butter. Luckily, the Chinese paid for the inventory loss and it hooked the elves on our ice cream."
Tinker sighed, combing her fingers back through her short hair. "Well, first I'll have to drain off the magic; by building a siphon that funnels magic to a storage unit. I have one set up for my electromagnet since a ley line runs through my scrapyard." She used to think of it as a strong ley line, but it was just a meandering stream compared to this torrent. "But that won't handle a flood like you're talking about."
"Whatever your grandfather did worked for years."
The question was—what had her grandfather done? To start from scratch would take time she didn't have, not with the black willow warming in the sun. Luckily, he had kept meticulous records on anything he ever worked on. "I'll go through his things and see if I can find a copy of the spell."
7: THINGS BETTER LEFT BURIED
The treaty between the elves and humans banned certain humans from Pittsburgh as it traveled back and forth between the worlds: criminals, the mentally insane, and orphans. When her grandfather had died, her cousin Oilcan had been seventeen and Tinker had just turned thirteen. Facing possible deportation, dealing with her grandfather's things had been the last thing on Tinker's mind. Truth be told, she'd run a little mad at the time, resisting Lain and Oilcan's attempts to have her move in with them. She had roamed the city, hiding from her grief, and sleeping wherever night found her. Terrified that she was going to lose the only world she'd ever known, she had drunk it down in huge swallows.
Only when Oilcan had turned eighteen, able to be her legal guardian, had they settled back into a normal life. With money from licensing her hoverbike design, she had set up her scrap yard business, moved into a loft, and laid claim to a sprawling garage between the two. Her grief, however, had been too fresh to deal with her grandfather's things; Oilcan and Nathan Czernowski had packed them up and stored them away in a room at the back of the garage.
Even now—looking at the small mountain of boxes, draped in plastic, smelling of age—it was tempting to just shut the door on the emotional land mines that the boxes might hold.
"Domi," Pony said quietly behind her. "What are we looking for here?"
"My grandfather created the spell at the ice cream factory. I need
to find his notes on it so I can fix it quickly. I figure it's in one of these boxes."
Pony nodded, looking undaunted by the task. "How can we help?"
Backing out of the whole tree mess wasn't really an option; she already had too many people involved. The dust, however, was making her nose itch.
"Can you take these boxes out to the parking pad?" She waved toward the square of sunbaked cement. "After I look through a box, you can put it back."
The first box she opened was actually some of their old racing gear. Inside were a dozen of their FRS walkie-talkies, heavily shielded against magic. She'd upgraded the team to earbuds, and mothballed the handheld radios.
"Score!" she cried. "This is just what I wanted!"
"What are they?" Pony picked one up. "Phones?"
"Close. I want to make it so the Hands can communicate over distance better. These are a little bit clunky but they're easy to use."
Oddly, Stormsong thought this was funny. She took the box, saying mysteriously, "This should be interesting."
Tinker supposed it could be worse. Her grandfather had been methodical in organizing his things. Oilcan kept everything carefully separated as he packed the boxes. Still she couldn't find anything filed under "Reinholds", "Refrigeration", "Ice Cream", or the type of compressor that Reinholds used.
"Ze domi," Stormsong murmured politely.
Tinker sighed. Random searching wasn't going to work. "What is it, Stormsong?"
"I want to thank you for yesterday."
"Yesterday?" Tinker found the Aa-Ak box and sat down beside it. "Can you put these boxes in alphabetical order?"
Stormsong started to rearrange the boxes, but switched to English, losing her polite mask. "Look, little one, you're a good kid—your heart is in the right place—so I guess I do have to thank you for that stupidity you pulled yesterday. If you hadn't come back, I'd be dead. But I had made my peace with that—being sekasha is all about choosing your life and your death—so don't ever pull that shit again. You really fucked up. When that thing hit you, you should have been so much dead meat—and that would have been a huge waste, because you are a good kid. The kind I would have been happy dying to protect—do you understand?"
Tinker blinked at her for moment, before finding her voice. "I thought I figured out a way to kill it."
"It wasn't your place to kill it."
"What? I lost at paper, scissors, stone?"
"You know what I hate about being a sekasha? It's the domana. We sekasha spend our lives learning the best way to handle any emergency. We train and train and train—and then have to kowtow to some domana who is just winging it because they've got the big guns. Do you know what? Just because you've got the big brains, or the kick-ass spells, doesn't mean you know everything. Next fight, shut the fuck up and do what you're told, or I'm going to bitch slap you."
It took Tinker a moment to find her voice. "You know, I think I like you better when you speak Elvish."
Stormsong laughed. "And I like you better when you speak English. You're more human."
Tinker controlled the urge to stick out her tongue. She deserved Stormsong's criticism because she had screwed up. Still, she suddenly felt like crying. Oh joy. The last few weeks had left her rubbed raw. Instead, she pushed the Aa-Ak box toward Stormsong, saying, "I'm done with this one," and moved on. At least, having had her say, Stormsong took the box away without comment.
Under "Birth" Tinker found birth certificates for everyone in the family but herself. She pulled Oilcan's and had Stormsong put it in the car. Under "Dufae" she found the original Dufae Codex carefully sealed in plastic. She'd only worked with the scanned copy that her father had made.
"Wow." That too she pulled out and had put in the Rolls to take home with her. The next box started with E's, and toward the back was a thick file folder marked simply "Esme." "What the hell?"
Tinker pried the file out of the box, flipped it open, and found Esme Shanske looking back. She ruffled quickly through the file. It was all information on Esme. NASA bios. Newspaper clippings. Photographs. It threw her into sudden and complete confusion.
"What are you doing here?" she asked Esme's photo. "I wasn't looking for you. What was I looking for?" She had to think a moment before remembering that she wanted to find her grandfather's notes on the spell at Reinholds so the walk-in freezer could function again so she could store the black willow. But why? "Why am I doing this again?"
Lain wanted the black willow (thus the whole reason it was salvaged in the first place) and it might revive—good reason to lock the tree in the cooler. The cooler was broken. She needed to fix it. They were all nice, sane, and logical links in a chain.
What made it all weird were her dreams and Esme popping up in odd places. It jarred hard with Tinker's orderly conception of reality. It pushed her into an uncomfortable feeling that the world wasn't as solid and fixed as she thought it was. She wanted to ignore it all, but Windwolf had said that it wasn't wise to ignore her dreams.
Perhaps if she dealt with them in a scientific manner, they wouldn't seem so—frighteningly weird.
She got her datapad and settled in the sun to write out what she remembered of the dream, and what had already materialized. The pearl necklace headed the list, since it was the first to appear. Second was the black willow and the ice cream. She considered the hedgehogs of the dream and the flamingoes in the book's illustrations and decided her future might be decidedly weird.
And who was the Asian woman in black? She felt that the woman had to be tengu because of the crows. She had felt, however, that she knew the woman, just as she knew Esme. Perhaps she was another colonist, which was why the birds kept repeating, "Lost." Riki had told her that the first ship was crewed by tengu. Then it hit her—Riki lied about everything. She flopped back onto the sun warm cement and covered her eyes. Gods, what was she doing? Trying to apply logic to dream symbols was not going to work! So how was she going to figure out the future with only dreams and possible lies?
"Domi." Pony's voice and the touch of his hand on her face yanked Tinker out of her nightmare. "Wake up."
Tinker opened her eyes and struggled awake. She lay on the warm, rough cement of the parking pad. Stormsong was doing a leisurely prowl in the alley. Pony knelt beside her, sheltering her from the sun. She groaned and rubbed at her eyes; they burned with unshed tears.
"What is it?"
"You were having a nightmare."
She grunted and sat up, not wanting to fall back to sleep, perchance to dream. Lately dreaming was a bitch. The oni had really force-fed her id some whoppers, not that her imagination really needed it, no thank you.
"Domi?" His dark eyes mirrored the concern in his murmured question. "Are you all right?"
"It was just a bad dream." She yawned so deep her face felt like it would split in half. "How can I sleep and wake up more tired?"
"You've only been asleep for a few minutes." He shifted so that he sat beside her. "Nor was it restful sleep."
"You're telling me." In her dreams, she hadn't been able to save him from being flayed of his tattoos. She leaned against his bare arm, his skin and tattoos wonderfully intact, glad for the opportunity to reassure herself without making a big deal of it. Just a nightmare.
He smelled wonderful. After weeks together, she knew his natural scent. He was wearing some kind of cologne, an enticing light musk. She felt the now familiar desire uncoil inside her. Gods, why did stress make her want to lick honey off his rock-hard abs? Was this some kind of weird primitive wiring—most of us are going off to be eaten by saber-toothed tigers, so let's fuck like crazy before the gene pool lessens? Or was she uniquely screwed up?
Every night with Pony among the oni had been a torture of temptation. There had been only one bed and she had been stupid enough to insist that they share it. She would lay awake, desperately wanting to reach out to him—to be held, to be made love to, to be taken care of. She managed to resist because of a little voice that reminded her that she woul
d swap Pony for Windwolf in a heartbeat—that it was her husband she really wanted. There had been no way to kick Pony out of the bed without admitting how much she wanted him, so he and her secret temptation stayed.
Even now she fought the urge to plant little kisses on his bicep. I'm a married woman. I'm married and I do love Windwolf. She couldn't even imagine being married to Pony, although she wasn't sure why—he was to-die-for cute. Unfortunately, she could imagine having hot sex with him. She sighed as her curiosity stirred to wonder what running her tongue up the curve of his arm would taste like. Now I've done it—it will eat me alive wondering . . .
