by Wen Spencer
“We?” Roach said.
“You don’t read Elvish, either,” Abbey said. “So it was joint effort.”
Roach opened the door to his truck and an elf-hound puppy tumbled out into his arms. “Pete sired this little one, so we’re calling him Repeat.”
Another baby animal. Oilcan was going to be able to open a petting zoo by the end of the week.
16: MORGUE BREAKING AND ENTERING
Lain had given Tinker swabs for taking DNA samples from the kids. They drove back into town with the box in her lap as she argued with Stormsong.
“All we’re going to do is stick these swabs in their mouth and rub them around a little.” Tinker couldn’t see why this was so hard to understand.
“Collecting DNA smacks of spell-working,” Stormsong repeated, using different words. So far she’d found three ways to say it.
“We’re not going to do any spell-working!” Tinker cried. “We need to know what the oni were doing with the kids. The oni could have been designing a plague to wipe out elves, or creating a spell to merge elves into crows like the tengu, or—or—I don’t know, and that’s what scares me. They could have been planning anything.”
“This is a bad idea.” Stormsong found a fourth way to say the same thing. “The first step of spell-working is establishing a baseline.”
Tinker wanted to scream. “Are you getting hit with a big sledgehammer that says ‘duck now or die’ or are you just bitching on general principle?”
Stormsong huffed. “Unlike some people, I don’t need clairvoyance to see trouble coming.”
“The children are Stone Clan.” Pony stepped in to mediate. “It is true that their clan is failing them utterly, but Stormsong is concerned that the Stone Clan will attempt to use anything questionable we do against us.”
Stormsong finally put her objection into a format Tinker could understand. “If the Stone Clan accuses us of spell-working, then the Wyverns will most likely see it in the worst light. They are the best of us because they were most heavily spell-worked.”
“Okay, that’s useful to know,” Tinker said.
“And since Oilcan is acting as the children’s sama,” Stormsong said, “he could be punished for recklessly endangering them.”
“Oh.” Tinker considered pitching the swabs out the window.
“Domi is right,” Pony said. “We need to know why the oni were kidnapping the children and keeping them alive. We will have to use caution in gathering the samples.”
Obviously, it was time to prove that she was the smartest person in Pittsburgh.
* * *
Which was how they ended up at the morgue.
Tinker avoided the front door on the theory that the fewer people they talked to, the better. She had Pony park where the ambulances and hearses unloaded the bodies. There was a big button marked PRESS FOR NIGHT ATTENDANT that she ignored. Instead she proceeded to hack the digital lock that required a transmitter key for entrance.
“You have no idea how disturbing it is that you know how to do that,” Stormsong murmured.
Tinker blushed. “People lock themselves out of their cars all the time. Since we operated a tow truck, they expected us to be able to help them.”
“Cars don’t have these types of locks.”
“This is just the end of the natural progression of experimentation once you begin playing with locks.”
Stormsong laughed, and the lock bleeped as it unlocked.
The body-admittance area was all bare cement, easy to hose down. The place smelled like a hospital, only worse, and their footsteps echoed weirdly.
There seemed to be no one there. It was perfect that the place was deserted, but it was also spooky. The actual morgue was through a series of locked doors that she had to hack the security to get open. She left the doors unlocked behind her so they could leave quickly.
* * *
The morgue was one giant walk-in freezer. The door opened to the solid smell of decomposing flesh. There were banks after banks of smaller doors to the drawers that held the actual dead people. The cold made Tinker’s skin goose bump over.
What a smart idea: visit the morgue. Who knew it would be so big?
But it made sense. The Pittsburgh area had once had a population in the millions. Considering they were in the middle of a war, the large facility was probably a good thing, too.
She so didn’t want to start opening drawers. There were dead naked strangers inside. Only way it could be worse was if they weren’t strangers. Gods, surely by now Nathan was safely buried.
Tinker scanned the freezer doors. She was really hoping for labels identifying who was where. The drawers were only numbered. Apparently there was a computerized list somewhere. It would be quicker to open and look than find a computer, hack through its security, and then figure out their filing system.
She just hated how icky it was going to be. It did not help that her Hand looked as freaked out as she felt. From what Windwolf told her in the past, elves had very little experience with the dead. Counting her grandfather, she had known more than a dozen people that died of old age. Morgues, funerals, and graveyards were human territory.
At least when she cracked open the first drawer, she found herself looking down at a bag-shrouded face and not bare feet. She should probably get gloves on and a mask.
* * *
After the first dozen or so times, she kind of got used to unzipping the bag and finding someone dead underneath the heavy plastic.
* * *
A systematic search was going to take forever. It took longer than she expected to pull out a drawer, unzip the bag, verify that it wasn’t an elf inside, zip it back up, and get the drawer back into place with the door closed. It was going to take hours, and every minute they spent at the morgue increased the risk of being caught.
Tinker was reconsidering taking the time to hack their computer system when she realized that Pony and Stormsong were in full Shield mode; close enough to her to cover her with their protective spells, hands riding on their swords, their focus toward the front door. “What is it?”
“Someone is coming,” Stormsong said.
“Shit,” Tinker whispered.
Tinker heard footsteps nearing, and a moment later the far door opened. “Hello?” a woman bellowed, and only when she yelped, “Nae, nae, nae! Scarecrow! Call off your dogs!” did Tinker recognize Esme’s voice.
“Hold!” Pony called to the others.
Esme came stomping up the hallway, ignoring the elves now that they had stood down. It was still weird looking at Esme and knowing that she was her mother. Due to a fluke in the hyper-phase gate design, Esme had spent all of Tinker’s life stuck in one moment in time and hadn’t aged. She was still only a few years older than Tinker. Like Lain, Esme was a head taller than Tinker could ever hope to get, boyishly thin, and, judging by the color of her eyelashes, a pale blonde under the purple hair dye. Despite a week of hospital rest, Esme looked haggard. She still wore her torn, bloody, and soot-smudged jumpsuit.
“I keep running into you at the strangest places,” Esme said. “What are you doing here, Scarecrow?”
If Tinker ever heard a stupid question, that was it. Breaking into the morgue was so blatant, it had to be obvious. “I’ve got official business here. What are you doing here?”
“Last I checked,” Esme said, “I’m here because a snarky elf princess landed me in Pittsburgh.”
Tinker shook her finger at Esme in frustration. “I saved your ass.”
“Yes, you did.” Esme scrubbed at her face as if she was exhausted. “I’m sorry; it’s all just hitting me hard. Everything I’ve been working for is over and done, and I’m here, and I’m not going to be stuck out in space, trying to piece together a life on whatever was left of a colony on the other side of the galaxy that’s been hit by a major disaster. I’m stuck on Elfhome—in a city that’s been hit by a major disaster—so there’s sixty thousand humans instead of a few hundred—and there’s oni and tengu and a talking dragon. An
d last week was eighteen years ago.”
Tinker winced. It hadn’t occurred to her that Esme was facing such a wrenching mental readjustment. The tengu had been taking it all in stride, but they knew about the tengu, oni, and talking dragon going in. When all was said and done, Esme had risked her life to save countless others.
“I don’t want to talk about what I’m doing here,” Tinker admitted reluctantly. “Because it could get me killed.”
“Oh.” Esme’s eyebrows knitted into worry. “Maybe you should just leave. I had a bad dream.”
“You dreamed about domi?” Pony asked, making Tinker realize that they’d been speaking Elvish with a smattering of English.
Esme shook her head. “No. I—I’ve been looking for someone. I had a dream about the place where he used to live. I dreamed of him running through the big empty rooms, laughing in hazy sunlight, and when I woke up in the hospital, it suddenly hit me that I could see him. I never thought I’d actually get to see him, and I just about lost it when I realized I would.”
“Him?” Tinker was feeling slightly betrayed. Esme realized that eighteen years had past and went looking for an old lover? Did she even remember she had left a kid behind?
Esme gave a laugh that edged along mania. “When I checked out of the hospital, I had some vague plan of calling my sister, but I just kept walking and walking. I hiked the whole way to the island. The place is in ruins—no one has lived there for years. The place looks like it was ransacked. There were pencil marks and dates on the wall—a record of him getting taller and taller—and then five years ago, it just stops!”
Tinker’s grandfather must have only told Esme that he was calling his grandchild Alexander Graham Bell. Esme was looking for a son. From the sound of it, Esme had gone to the abandoned hotel on Neville Island where Tinker had grown up. After their grandfather died, Oilcan had talked her into moving to McKees Rocks. He moved their grandfather’s books and files to safe storage, leaving behind all their childhood clutter, and boarded shut the hotel.
“There were all the little bits of him scattered around,” Esme said wistfully. “Little toy robots and model airplanes and one hallway that had tiny little handprints all up and down it in blue paint—okay, that was kind of Blair Witch creepy—but it was his hands. And he had the constellations done in glow-in-the-dark paint on his ceiling—just like I had when I was a kid.”
Lain had helped Tinker paint the stars, muttering darkly, “Nature or nurture?”
“He was everywhere and nowhere,” Esme whispered. “And that’s when I really did lose it.”
All of which Tinker could have prevented if she had just told Esme the truth when they were on the Dahe Hao together. “I’m sorry.”
“I cried myself to sleep on his bed.” Esme walked to one of the morgue drawers and pressed her hand to the stainless-steel door. “And then I dreamed where I’d find him.”
“What? Oh, no, no, no.” Tinker moved to stop her, but Esme opened the door and pulled out the drawer. “You don’t need to—”
There was something horribly wrong about the shrouded body inside. The hidden geography was all too short and lacking in landmarks: the peak made by the nose, the valley of the throat, the distant points of the feet. Esme unzipped the bag in one rushed motion, like she was getting it done fast before she chickened out.
It was the male child that the oni had butchered down to eat—a gruesome collection of parts. Laid out like a half-assembled jigsaw puzzle, it was made more horrifying by what was missing.
Esme whimpered and stumbled backward.
Despite coming to the morgue to find the murdered children, Tinker wasn’t prepared for the sight. She could only stare dazed at the butchered male and remember the smell of roasting meat that hung in the air of the whelping pen’s kitchen.
“Domi,” Pony murmured. “Can we do what is needed and cover it up?”
Tinker blinked up at him, confused for a minute as to why they were there. Oh, yes, DNA samples. She fumbled with one of the swabs to unwrap it and then forced herself to rub the clean white tip against the bloody stump of a severed arm.
Only as she closed the cap did she realize Esme was silently weeping.
“Oh, Esme, this isn’t your son,” Tinker said. “This is a male elf child killed by the oni. I was looking for him.”
Esme shook her head. “I dreamed that I’d find him here. I opened the drawer and there he was—newborn like when I left Earth—crying. It’s him.”
Stormsong snorted. “You’ve flung wide open a door that’s not easy to keep closed in the first place. Your blood tie to domi means that her nuenae can easily overlap yours. The more you interact with her, the more her nuenae will transpose yours.”
Esme wasn’t listening. “He’s here!” She walked halfway down the row of doors and opened another drawer, seemingly at random. “And he’s helpless—and flying monkeys are coming for him.”
“Oh gods, I thought we were done with that shit,” Tinker whimpered. Esme had driven her nearly mad by invading Tinker’s dreams, calling for help through the only line of communication available to the astronauts trapped in space. It had been an insane week full of prophetic nightmares. Again and again, Tinker had found herself facing a twisted echo of something she had dreamed. She so didn’t want to go through that again.
Esme unzipped the body bag to reveal the young elf female.
Tinker groaned at the sight of the child. None of the dead humans had been battered into broken bones held together with torn flesh. Tinker’s hand shook as she swabbed the inside of the female’s mouth, trying to ignore that her jaw had been broken so badly that the bones had pierced the skin and half her teeth were missing. Tinker murmured apologies as she plucked a few strands of hair free, just in case.
“What are you doing?” Esme asked.
“I’m trying to figure out why the oni kidnapped these children,” Tinker explained. “Only, establishing DNA baselines is the first step of bioengineering magic—which is highly illegal, even for me.”
“We should hurry,” Pony said. “If someone else is coming.”
“There’s one more,” Tinker told Esme. “A second male. Can you find him, too?”
Esme frowned but nodded. She concentrated for a minute before picking a third drawer on the other side of the room.
Taking samples from the second male was even more emotionally wrenching. His face was relatively undamaged, and he reminded Tinker of Oilcan. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to be in the room, wearing the gloves and the mask, breathing in the omnipresent reek of rotting flesh. She fled out of the room, blinking back tears, desperately tearing at the gloves with latex-encased fingers.
Pony wordlessly caught her hands with his and pulled the gloves free and then held her until the need to scream and throw things passed.
“They shouldn’t be here,” Tinker growled. The children had been innocent and trusting and had forever ahead of them; they shouldn’t be locked in these little boxes, surrounded by death.
“No, they should not. They be should be given up to the sky so their souls can be free of their bodies.”
“What do you mean? How do we give them up to the sky?”
“They should be cremated as soon as possible. To be trapped in a dead body is torment to the soul.”
Tinker remembered then that most elf ghost stories started with someone dying and not being properly cremated. “How—how do I make this happen? Who takes care of these things?”
“Normally their clan.” Pony reluctantly added, “But none of the Stone Clan would know how.”
“Are you sure about that?” Tinker muttered.
“I did not know that you locked your dead into steel drawers,” Pony admitted unhappily. “I would have not known how to find this place even if I had known that was your custom.”
Tinker wanted to argue that any of the elves could ask Maynard for directions, but Pony had a point. The Stone Clan might have assumed that the children’s bodies had been automati
cally cremated by the humans once they’d been recovered from the whelping pens.
“Someone is coming.” Stormsong moved between Tinker and the door.
“It’s the flying monkeys,” Esme whispered and wisely moved back, giving the sekasha lots of room to move.
Tinker doubted very much it was literally flying monkeys. Riki had been the last person associated with that imagery. He had saved her life two or three times during the week of insane dreams. He had also kidnapped her twice. Tinker hid away the swabs in the messenger bag, freeing up her spell-casting hand.
She listened closely but could hear nothing. The sekasha, though, shifted as they tracked someone moving through the otherwise empty building.
Pony signed a question in blade talk.
Stormsong lifted up one finger then indicated that the sole invader was just beyond the last door. They stood tense for a long silence and then the doorknob slowly turned and the door creaked opened.
TV reporter Chloe Polanski stood in the doorway, eyes narrowing as she took in Tinker and the sekasha. She was in a flawless black pantsuit belted with a wide swatch of alligator leather. After a moment of calculating study, her predatory smile slid into place. “You’re so much easier to catch now, Vicereine. What are you doing here so late at night?”
Oh gods, could it get any worse? By tomorrow, everyone in Pittsburgh could know that Tinker was taking DNA samples.
Pony drew his ejae, his face set to a cold warrior death mask. Taking their cue from her First, the others drew their swords.
Yes, it could get worse. Tinker couldn’t lie in front of the sekasha. If she told Chloe about the DNA scans, her Hand would probably kill the reporter to keep her from spreading the information. Time to dance on the razor-sharp edge of truth.
“Several children of the Stone Clan were killed by oni.” Tinker frantically signed hold in blade talk. “Their bodies were brought here by mistake. Well, not really a mistake, but elves see storing the dead like this as a torture to the soul. I need to find someone that can cremate the children so their souls are released from their bodies—tonight, if possible.”
