Wolf crouched beside her. "You're going to use the light to communicate?"
She smiled and leaned down to touch her forehead to his. "Exactly. By the composition of the buildings inside the Ghostlands, it's clear that Earth is one of the dimensions intersected by this Discontinuity. The blue shift of the area seems to indicate that certain wavelengths of light are being absorbed and only the blue is reflecting back to us."
"So other wavelengths are traveling on through to the other dimensions?"
"I think so. If we communicate with Earth, we might be able to get them to help. I'm just a little worried that no one on their end will be paying attention—this will only work in the middle of the night."
"They're missing a city with sixty thousands souls. They're paying attention."
"Well—there is that." She kissed him and went back to work.
"Have you considered that the oni will see this too?"
"Yes, I know, that's a flaw in the plan. We'll have to consider any communication from another world as suspect."
He considered this problem as she typed. "It is unfortunate that the EIA had been compromised. Maynard might have had a way to verify any communication from the UN as authentic."
"Hmmm, hadn't considered that angle. Human agencies that have security protocols. Wait—I wonder—what happened to those NSA agents?"
"The human agents that tried to kidnap you?"
His tone made her glance at him and giggle. "Oh, don't look like that. They only wanted to protect me from the oni. They actually were nice, once they stopped trying to drag me back to Earth."
"Maynard will know where they are, if they are in Pittsburgh."
She took out a cell phone and made it beep repeatedly. "I would have never dreamed of having the God of Pittsburgh's phone number in my address book."
"He is not God of Pittsburgh. He is our servant."
"Somehow I doubt that he sees it that way." Her face changed as the call went through. "Oh, hi, yeah, this is Tinker. Say, do you know what happened to the NSA agents? Briggs and Durrack? Really?" She listened for a minute. "Oh cool! Can you send them out to Turtle Creek? I need them out here. Thanks."
As she hung up, Wolf wondered what Maynard made of the phone call. It was a perfect example, though, of his domi's leadership skills. She saw the need and did what was needed to fill it without guidance from him. All she needed was the authority of her title. And she probably did not realize how rare the ability was.
"They didn't leave last Shutdown, so they're stuck here." Tinker relayed what she learned. "They've been working with him. Apparently when they kidnapped me, he put them through a detailed background check. They're among the few people in Pittsburgh he could trust to be who they said they were. He was using them to weed through the EIA's databases to find altered files and recover the original data."
Her walkie-talkie beeped and one of the work crews reported in that the other two searchlights were in place and pointed down into the valley. The walkie-talkies tickled him to no end. That was what he wanted for his people—the ease of communication that humans had.
Tinker glanced up into the night sky. Dark lay full on the land and the stars gleamed brilliant overhead. "What do you think? Is it dark enough?"
"It will not get any darker without clouds."
"These lights are about two hundred times brighter than a normal lightbulb," Tinker warned him. "You shouldn't look directly at them when they're on. Okay, let's see if it works." Tinker radioed the other two units with "Turn them on."
The three beams of light cut brilliant down into the valley. Midway the light shifted to blue, somewhat muted, but still dazzling in the pitch darkness.
"Hmm, that's a good sign," Tinker murmured.
"Did you plan tonight because of the lack of moon?" Wolf asked.
"I'd love to say yes, but actually we just got lucky." Tinker clicked her keyboard, activating her program. The searchlights started to flash. "I've written a short script in Morse code—C-Q-C-Q-C-Q-D-E-S-1-K—and interspersed it with three minutes of darkness."
"What does that mean?"
"This manual says it means 'calling any station, this is designation station one, listening.' I'm not sure if that's totally correct Morse, but I figure it's close enough for horseshoes."
She saw his smile, and her eyes widened as she realized what she'd said, and then she smiled too. He'd asked her to be his domi after playing horseshoes with her.
The searchlights snapped off, plunging them into darkness, and Tinker slid down into his lap.
"Did you—" Tinker whispered to him. "Did you have lovers other than Jewel Tear—and the sekasha?"
"A few. Not many. I had my insane idea of coming to the Westernlands and establishing a holding here."
She made a small unhappy sound.
"If I had known you were in my future, I would have waited," he whispered. "Think, this way I came to you a skilled lover. This way one of us knew how it was done."
"I can build a hyperphase jump gate, I'm sure I could have figured sex out. Insert Tab M into Slot F. Repeat until done."
Windwolf laughed. "You delight me."
"Good. You delight me too."
They stole several minutes for themselves. With much regret, Wolf focused back on their many problems. "I think we'd better strengthen our position." he said. "We're going to stir the oni up doing this."
"Oh! I hadn't considered that," Tinker said.
He was learning that his domi became so fixated on a puzzle that she ignored the outside world. It meant that she could lock all of her brilliance onto finding a solution, but it left her open to being blindsided.
He kissed her brow and reluctantly left her to make the valley safe for her.
Despite their rocky start, Tinker actually liked the NSA agents. They arrived in a sleek grey sedan so out of place in Pittsburgh that it didn't need the D.C. plates to identify it as out of town. Nobody drove new cars because the parts were too hard to find, and no one knew how to service them. Corg Durrack and Hannah Briggs got out of the car cautiously, as if they were trying not to spook the heavily armed elves.
Both NSA agents, though, looked like they could hold their own with the sekasha.
The tall, leggy Briggs wore a clingy black outfit that looked like wet paint, and slid in and out of the shadows with feline grace. A Batman utility belt with small mystery packs had been added to her ensemble, slung low on her hips, holstering her exotic long-barreled handgun. Tinker couldn't tell if Briggs was now flaunting her weapon, or just displaying the one that was impossible to conceal.
Corg Durrack had a boyish face and the body of a comic book hero. He carried his usual peace offering of a white wax-paper bag, which he held out Tinker with a grin. "Your favorite."
"I'll be the judge." Tinker opened to the bag to find her favorite cookies—chocolate frosting thumbprint cookies from Jenny Lee. "This is spooky. How did you know?"
"It's our job to know." Durrack winked.
Briggs scoffed at this, and drifted back into the darkness.
"So what's our little mad scientist up to now?" Durrack settled down beside Tinker's chair where Windwolf had been a short time before. The searchlight flashed the work area with brightness as it cycled through the short message.
Tinker stuck her tongue out at him. "You know, I thought Maynard kicked you two out of Pittsburgh months ago."
"You were only the top of our to-do list. It took twenty-four hours of negotiations, but we stayed in this mud hole after the last Shutdown."
She laughed at the look of disgust on Durrack's face. "You don't like our fair city?"
"This isn't our world and the elves seem determined to remind us of that every chance they get. Besides, it's like getting stuck in a time warp; Pittsburgh is missing a lot of the simple conveniences of home. The television sucks here. And I would kill for Starbucks."
"Starbucks?" Tinker said. "Sounds Elvish. Who is he?"
Durrack gave her an odd look.
br /> "What else is on your to-do list?" Tinker asked.
"Little of this, little of that," Durrack said. "Gather intelligence."
"In Pittsburgh?"
"You're got five or six races stuffed under one roof, it makes for lots of secrets floating around."
"How do you get six?"
Corg ticked them off on his fingers. "The elves, the humans, the oni, the tengu, the mixed bloods, and now a dragon—which the tengu say is a sentient being."
The searchlight fell dark, dropping them into blackness.
Tinker wasn't sure why, but she found it annoying that the NSA had apparently talked to the tengu about the dragon. "I didn't know you were so friendly with the tengu."
"Politics has nothing to do with friendship." Durrack's voice came out of the darkness. "It's doing whatever you have to do to protect what's yours. Pittsburgh might be under UN control, but its people are Americans and it's our duty to protect them."
"You realize the tengu lie."
"Everyone lies."
"The elves don't. They see it as dishonorable."
"They might not lie, but they dance around the truth. Like yesterday, during that little encounter you had with the tree. You analyze the events and it's fairly clear that the Stone Clan tried to kill you. Forest Moss withheld his support until you were captured by the tree, and the building you should have landed in collapsed for no apparent reason."
"I know."
"He made elegant excuses about why he was so slow, but it was all bullshit. He wanted that tree to kill you."
"I know. You don't have to rub it in."
"Are they trying to keep you from building another gate? If there is a way to travel back and forth between Pittsburgh and Earth, the treaty stays intact."
She hadn't considered that as the reason why the Stone Clan wanted her eliminated. "Nothing I could build would transport the entire city."
"At this point, I'd take a trapdoor back to Earth."
Tinker laughed. "And I'm not sure I can really build a gate that works right. Look at the mess I made with this one."
The searchlight flared on, bathing the Discontinuity with brilliance.
"Is it getting bigger?" Durrack asked.
Tinker nodded. "And oni are coming through it."
"Yeah, I saw the kappa you pulled out. The oni are sick puppies to warp their people into monsters like that. You know, the more I find out about the oni, the more I think the elves are right in wiping them out. The problem is collateral damage."
"I don't think the tengu are all that bad." Tinker whispered what she hadn't had the courage to say to Windwolf.
"The tengu aren't oni," Durrack said. "They were mountain tribes of humans living on Onihida, descendants of people that ended up there by mistake. The story goes that half of them were killed on a battlefield trying to resist the oni, and the greater bloods that defeated them merged the survivors with the carrion crows that had been feeding on their fathers and brothers. Twisted little tale, isn't it?"
"But it is true?"
"Their DNA supports the claim."
The searchlight finished its cycle and dropped them into silent darkness.
If the story was true, then the tengu had been screwed from the very start, the moment their ancestors lost their way and fell from Earth.
"I'm going to do everything I can to protect the humans of Pittsburgh," Tinker said. "But I don't know what I can do for the tengu."
"From what I've seen, there's not much anyone can do for the tengu."
"How long are we going to do this?" Durrack asked an hour later, when darkness fell over them yet again.
"Until the lightbulbs burn out, my husband loses his patience, I figure out something better—or they answer us."
"Want to bet which happens first?"
"My bet is that they answer us, or the bulbs burn out. The lifespan of these bulbs are rated at a thousand hours, but there's no telling how many hours they have left."
"And there are no replacement bulbs?" Durrack guessed.
"Nope, not unless Earth can sling them through the Ghostlands."
"Are we going to be able to tell if they're answering us?"
"I have a collection of detecting devices aimed at the valley to catch heat, light, sound, and motion."
"Where are you aiming the spotlights?"
"At the buildings. I'm not sure if the air over the valley is part of the Discontinuity, so I'm not positive if light passing through it will be visible in another dimension. The buildings though, will either reflect the light or absorb it, which in theory makes them visible on all dimensions—but I could be wrong."
"This just seems so basic. If it could work, then Earth should have—"
Blue slashed upward, out of the darkness, pulsing in the rhythm of Morse code.
"They're responding!" Tinker scrambled to kill her transmission program. Her detectors were already translating the flashes.
Calling S1, this is S2, listening.
"It's Earth!" she said.
"You don't know that. Here." Durrack nudged her away from the keyboard. "This is where I come in—remember?"
The searchlights flashed quickly through code and then went dark.
"What are you saying?" Tinker asked.
"I'm requesting verification. It might take them a while to dig someone up who can answer . . . or they might have someone standing by. Fort Meade isn't that far from the Pittsburgh border."
The valley went dark and then a reply blazed back.
"Someone standing by?" Tinker asked.
"No, they want to know if Pittsburgh is safe on Elfhome."
"Depends on your definition of safe."
Durrack laughed and typed. "I'm repeating my request. Never give info unless you're sure of who is listening."
"Most likely the oni on Onihida can see this."
"Exactly."
Wolf returned to his domi to find her looking unhappy.
"What is it?"
"We've verified we're talking to Earth. The gate is gone, just like we thought. Pittsburgh is stranded."
"You are still communicating?"
"We're comparing notes—seeing if we can use the Ghostlands to our advantage, or close it up somehow. From the sounds of it, though, Earth is still fighting over who has jurisdiction."
A runner from Poppymeadow's threaded his way through the sekasha to hold out a piece of paper. "A distant voice came from Aum Renau, relayed from court."
Wolf took the folded paper, opened it, and read the five English words within: Follow the yellow brick road. He frowned at the message and flipped the paper over, hoping for more. No. That was it.
"What does it say?" Tinker asked.
He handed it to her. "It's from Pure Radiance. I sent word to the intanyei seyosa caste asking for help with your dreams. I don't understand this."
"Follow the yellow brick road? Follow the yellow brick road? Just point the sucker out and I will. So far, I haven't found any road—bricked yellow or otherwise—figuratively, literally, allegorically."
"You understand her message?"
"No!" She sighed deeply. "But it looks like I have to figure it out."
19: SNAKES, SNAILS, AND PUPPY-DOG TAILS
Tinker kicked the blackened remains of the willow tree. It had died on the waterfront, leaving a burnt trail from the warehouse. Several buildings along its path had scorch marks where the burning tree had brushed up against them while staggering toward the river.
"Okay, let's take it from the top. We're off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz."
"Because?" Pony asked.
"Because—because—because—because." Tinker didn't know. Did she ever know?
"Because of the wonderful things he does," Stormsong deadpanned.
Tinker glared at her. "In the dream, the yellow brick road led to the willow trees." She gave the tree another kick. "Which threw apples at us. Esme told me to follow the fruit to find the wizard—which is the dragon."
She followed the black path of soot and cinders back toward the warehouse. "Lain gave me one of the seeds, but I couldn't figure out anything interesting with it. Most of the times it doesn't even wriggle. So obviously fruit is something else. Whatever it is, it will lead us to the dragon. The dragon is the desired end product—not the fruit."