Tinker had never worked with astronauts before and was amazed how quickly they learned. While Esme had fired the positioning jets to stop the ship's rotation and pulled them back into a stable orbit, Jin drafted a team of people to drain excess magic from the computer equipment. Despite Esme's "you're the Scarecrow" statements, everyone seemed hesitant about Tinker actually working with the ship's systems. After Tinker trained the astronauts, she found herself in a supervisory-only position. She floated in place, stranded by the lack of gravity, with an ice pack strapped to her ankle.
For some reason—whether it was because Tinker had missed the event, or because she was the ultimate outsider as an elf, or because she had magically appeared—the astronauts started to tell her their stories. They had gone through a harrowing experience, filled with confusion, death, lucky chances, small miracles, and a great deal of heroics. At the core of it all was Esme, riding roughshod over rules and logic, ruthless in purpose, making one lucky guess after another. Esme, everyone agreed, forged a miracle, salvaging what should have been complete disaster.
Even Esme opened up to Tinker when they found themselves alone together. "One summer, while I was in college, I went to visit my older sister on Elfhome. Two months on another world—it seemed like an exotic vacation. Then the dreams started—like I had some third eye that had been forced open and I was made to see. Some of what I had to do was so very clear, like changing my master's degree to astrophysics and applying to NASA. Some of it was—blind faith—that it would matter. Somehow."
"I hate to tell you this, but I have no idea how to help you beyond this."
"This buys me time, which is what I needed most, Scarecrow." Esme scowled at her screens. "It gives me a chance to figure out what the fuck to do next."
"Don't call me Scarecrow. I rented the movie and watched it. Everyone in that movie was a dysfunctional idiot."
"You didn't read the books? The Scarecrow is the wisest being in Oz and rules the kingdom after the wizard and Dorothy leave."
Tinker found the news vaguely disturbing. "That doesn't help."
"It's like flying blind in the clouds—you have to have faith in what instruments tell you. The dreams told me that I needed you. Things are still iffy—but I have a chance now to make everything right."
Tinker was torn between relief and annoyance that Esme seemed to think Tinker's part was done. She didn't want to be responsible for all the astronauts, but she didn't want to be stuck in space either. She didn't know what else to do. She couldn't even stay decent. Without gravity to constrain it, the skirt of Tinker's red silk dress developed a life of its own, determined to show off her panties as often as possible. Still, she had hoped they had gotten past all the dream bullshit. She hated not having an obvious direction to go, a clear-cut problem to solve. The path here had been so convoluted, the clues so obscure, that she would never have guessed where it was taking her. She supposed that she could only do everything she could imagine, and hope that one of them was the right thing.
Sighing, Tinker nudged one of the magic sinks. "These are just makeshift. They'll fill quickly and then leak. We'll have to burn off the magic until we can create a large, permanent storage tank."
"How do we do burn it?" Esme asked.
"You burn it off by doing spells," Tinker explained. "It can be used to create heat, light, cool things off, do healing—"
"Healing?" Jin seized hold of the word, proving that her "private" conversation with Esme had been just an illusion.
Tinker pulled out her datapad and made sure it worked. "Well, I have spells for healing but I don't know much about—"
Jin didn't let Tinker finish. He scooped her up and they flew through the ship as if Jin had wings. "We've got so many wounded that we've wiped out the Dahe's supplies. Most of the medical supplies on the other ships were destroyed."
"I really don't know much about healing," Tinker finally managed to finish her statement.
"We're desperate. Some of our people—we can't do any more for them."
"Are they tengu?" Tinker asked.
He stopped and looked down at her. "You won't help us?"
"I didn't say that—although a 'please' would go a long way. It makes a difference what spells I use. Some won't work on humans—but they might work on tengu."
"Please, help my people. I beg you. They're dying."
She felt shame and anger at the same time that he would think she would let a wounded person die merely because of some biological difference she could barely see. "I'll do what I can. I just don't know how much that will be."
The infirmary was a tiny cramped place stained with blood, filled with people hooked to machines. The beds were more like cocoons with nylon bags holding the patients flat. Jin paused at the first bed to gaze at a blond man lying there.
"What happened to Chan Way Kay?"
"Sorry, Jin, we lost her," a man said from back of the room.
"This is Wai Sze Wong." Jin turned Tinker's attention to the patient to her other side. "She's tengu."
Wai Sze was Black from Tinker's dream. More a sparrow than a crow, she was a little female with delicate wrists and fingers. Massive bruising on Wai Sze ran the range from deep purple to pale yellow. Apparently they had run out of surgical tape, as black electrical tape held splints on Wai Sze's left arm and leg in place. The monitors on her showed an unsteady heartbeat.
Tinker gasped in the shock of recognition and the extent of Wai Sze's injuries. "I—I—can only guess at how to help her."
"So guess." Jin gave her a look that spoke of trust and confidence. "We have done all we can, and she's only getting worse. If you can't save her, then we're going to lose her."
Tinker sighed and tried to think. Riki had recuperated quickly from the savage beating Tinker had given him, so the tengu probably had recuperative powers similar to the elves'. Tinker had saved Windwolf's life with a spell that focused magic into his natural healing powers. The ambient level of the ship, while enough to wreak havoc on the unshielded computer systems, was actually quite low. If the tengu's ability was close enough to the elves', the same spell might save Wai Sze. She searched the memory of her datapad and found that she did have the spell downloaded.
"Do you have transferable circuit paper?" Tinker asked.
Jin nodded.
"Okay," Tinker said. "I need the first magic sink we set up, some power leads, and a computer connection so I can print on the circuit paper."
One of these days she had to learn bio magic. She hated gambling with people's lives. Hopefully today wasn't going to be the day that she guessed wrong.
She explained to the doctor how she needed Wai Sze prepped while Jin sent people off to fetch the sinks and leads, and then Jin took her to print off the spell.
"If this spell works, we can use it on all the tengu." She explained to Jin how it focused magic on the tengu's natural abilities. "But it's useless on humans. For them, I'll need to see if there is a spell for their specific injury in my codex. It will be a much slower process."
"Let's save the spell onto this system; that way, if Wai Sze shows improvement, I can come back and print off more spells while you start working with the humans."
When they returned, they found Wai Sze stripped bare to her waist. Burning with embarrassment, Tinker peeled the protective sheet from the circuit paper and pressed the spell to Wai Sze's small chest as Jin watched her intently. It required a lot of fiddling to make sure it was smoothed down over the hills and valleys of Wai Sze's breasts. On the female's hip was a tattoo of a lion overlaying the Leo star constellation, Leo's heart—the star Regulus—a blaze of blue-white in its chest. Tinker used it to change the subject. "She's a Leo?"
"Hmm? Oh, that, no, it's for Gracie's husband, Leo. He got a tattoo for her in the same place, a little bird."
Gracie was obviously the Americanization of Wai Sze's name. Leo was the name of Tinker's father, killed by the tengu before she was born. "He's a tengu?"
"No, Leo was human. He
was my college roommate at MIT—and my best friend for many years."
"Was?"
Jin glanced at her sharply. Whatever he saw on her face made his hard look softened. "Leo and Gracie were like Romeo and Juliet. They fell madly in love at first sight. Their families didn't want them to be together. They got secretly married. And it all ended in senseless tragedy. Leo was killed in an accident, and for the last five years, Gracie has been suicidal with grief. Crows mate for life."
"Leo's family didn't want him to marry her?" Tinker asked. "They knew she was tengu?"
"No. We were Chinese—that was enough."
Yes, that would have been enough. Much as she loved her grandfather, she knew the truth of his bigotry. She had been wondering why she dreamed of Gracie. Now she could only remember how the little tengu female had endlessly wept in her dreams.
Tinker had taped the leads to the power-distributor ring of the spell and hooked the other ends to the battery. "You check to make sure all the metal is clear of the spell. It would distort the effect of the spell, which could be deadly. The activation word is pronounced this way."
Jin listened closely, and then nodded as the outer ring powered up, casting a glowing sphere over the rest of the spell. The healing spell itself kicked in, the timing cycle ring clicking quickly clockwise as the magic flowed through the spell in a steady rhythm. "How long before we can tell if it's going to work?"
Tinker shrugged. "On an elf, I could tell immediately."
As they watched, color flushed back into Gracie's face and her breathing grew deeper. The machines monitoring her health verified that her heart was stabilizing.
Jin clapped his hands, just like an elf would, to summon the attention of the gods to him, and then whispered a prayer. Tinker floated in place, gazing at the female who would have been her mother, if everything had gone differently. Had it been chance that put Gracie on the same ship as Esme—or some dream-inspired plan of Tinker's real mother?
Jin finished his prayer and turned to Tinker. "Thank you. Truly you must have been sent by the gods to us."
"No, just the wizard of Oz."
21: NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Wolf was ready to kill something. They should have been reacting quickly, but instead they stalled with negotiations. Wolf had demanded that one of the Stone Clan return to the enclaves to guard the noncombatants. Earth Son assigned the task to Jewel Tear but then tried to maneuver True Flame into qualifying it as a failure on Wolf's part to protect the enclaves.
"I can choose to protect the enclaves," Wolf said, "and leave you to face the dragon."
"We will have the dreadnaught," Earth Son pointed out.
"No, we won't," True Flame snapped. "Human weapons can't pierce the dragon shielding. The dreadnaught is good at spotting and attacking ground troops. It would be an aerial banquet table for the dragon."
"We should travel light," True Flame continued. "One Hand each. The fewer we have to protect, the better."
Wolf let Wraith choose which of his sekasha would remain. Wolf drew Little Horse and Stormsong aside; of the sekasha returning to the enclaves, they were the ones best suited to interacting with humans. "Call Maynard. Let him know what his people might be facing. They need to know that their weapons won't work on this."
* * *
Even as Jewel Tear and the extra sekasha left, Earth Son was still arguing against True Flame's decision. "We should wait until it comes to us. Running around looking for it will only weaken our position."
Wolf scoffed at this idea. "Sit here on our hands while it does what it will to the city?"
"Property damage can be fixed later," Earth Son said.
"And what of the humans?" Wolf said.
Earth Son had the gall to say, "I do not know why you fuss so. They are short-lived anyhow."
"I think we should go and be the heroes." Forest Moss struck a heroic pose. "Females are attracted to males of action."
"What females?" Earth Son cried.
"Poor Earth Son, I might have one blind eye—" Forest Moss tapped his cheek under his ruined eye and then reached out to tap both of Earth Son's. "—but apparently you have two."
Earth Son slapped away Moss' hand. "I am not blind."
"Then you must see that this city is filled with fertile young females? There are so few domana females, and they are a choosy lot. The law prevents us from taking lovers outside our own caste who are not sekasha with naekuna, and the sekasha frown on us making another caste into domana—that would be too much like our Skin Clan fathers. Would not the sane plan be to follow Wolf Who Rules' path, winnow out the perfect female from the thousands and thousands of humans, and make her elfin?"
"No!" Earth Son flinched back from the mad one. "Are you capable of even recognizing sanity?"
Forest Moss thought a moment and then shrugged. "The sad truth is: I am not sure. But neither am I sure I care. I have found a certain freedom in madness. Ah, but it is oh so lonely. I do not wish to be alone anymore. Unfortunately, I have fallen into a paradox. As domana, I cannot attract a household without sekasha, but the sekasha no longer trust me. I failed to protect what was mine. What a small mistake led to my downfall, and I did not make it alone. At our first encounter with the oni, despite their displays of friendship, we should have fought. One miscalculation and all was lost. Lost forever."
"I fell in love," Windwolf stated coldly. "Do not mistake my honest passion for calculated convenience."
Forest Moss made little flicking motions with his hand. "Feh, feh, I will love her. She will, after all, win me what I wish for the most. I tried to show my responsibility and leadership by holding dogs and monkeys, and small birds. Surely keeping safe such fragile packages of life shows some ability to protect? Alas, no elf has offered themselves into my keeping."
"And this mad plan would bring you respect?" Earth Son looked puzzled.
"Beloved Tinker holds two sekasha. I'm told that she lacks a full Hand merely due to the limits of time. Even the renowned Bladebite offered to her. Surely there is another female of the same caliber in this city."
"No," Windwolf growled. "My domi is a rare and treasured find."
Forest Moss refused to be distracted from his plan. "Ah, well, I will have to settle for some lesser gem then. Let us be off. There are dragons to kill, and females to impress."
With the elder Stone Clan male strutting off, Earth Son had no choice but to agree to go after the dragon. It made sense now that Forest Moss had tried to use the aumani to gain Little Horse. Although young, Little Horse's bloodlines meant young sekasha would be willing to look to him as First. There was some sound reasoning to that—as well as this current plan of Forest Moss. Both, however, were equally distasteful.
Hopefully Malice would cut short Forest Moss's plan.
Tinker spent hours in the infirmary, choosing spells out of the Dufae Codex, modifying them to work with the batteries, printing them off, and casting them. She was learning that she wasn't cut out to be a doctor; having to touch strangers so intimately was still unnerving.
Being weightless was at once a joy and a constant reminder that she wasn't on Elfhome. What had happened when she fell into the Ghostlands? Pony had been up on the scaffolding with her. Had he fallen into the deadly cold and died? Or had he fallen through, like her, and was now lost on another world, or out in space? The possibilities terrified her. She wouldn't allow herself to even consider what that might have happened to Windwolf. There was, however, the dreadful knowledge that Windwolf would put himself between Malice and Pittsburgh, and continue until either he or Malice was dead. She had to get back and help Windwolf—somehow.
The largest drawback to being weightless was that you didn't fall down when you fell asleep. One moment she was drifting in a niche, waiting for some crew to move past, trying to think of a weapon that could kill Malice. The next she was wondering if there was enough black willow left to make lively maple-flavored ice cream. Dragons, Oilcan was telling her over the phone, had a weakness for sw
eets.
"You're going to have to make it." She became aware that she had made the phone from two tin cans and a long string of red thread strung between them. The thread vibrated as they talked, a blur of red, resonating to their voices. Resonation was the key to everything. "It's really easy to make. Just follow Grandpa's recipe."
She realized then that the ice cream had been what they needed all along—but she had taken the recipe with her. While she considered this, she drifted through the wall of the spaceship. Space, it turned out, was all sticky, sweet black treacle. Here was all the molasses they would want. She could make the ice cream out of this—only how did she get it back to Pittsburgh? Fling it from orbit? No, no, it would all burn up before it hit Pittsburgh.