6: LIVELY MAPLE FLAVOR
For years, Tinker had thought of herself as famous. The invention and mass production of the hoverbike made Tinker's name well-known even before she started to race. True, few people realized that the girl in the "Team Tinker" shirt was the famed inventor/racer; still, she often got a reaction when she introduced herself.
But she wasn't prepared for the welcome she received at the Reinholds' offices.
The receptionist looked up as Tinker and her bodyguards entered. "Can I help . . ." the woman started, and then her gaze shifted from Pony to Tinker, and her question ended in a high squeal that drew everyone's eyes. "Oh, my god! Oh, my god! It's the fairy princess!"
Tinker glanced over her shoulder, hoping that there would be a female in diaphanous white behind her. No such luck. "Pardon?"
"You're her!" The woman jumped up and down, hands to her mouth. "You're Tinker, the fairy princess!"
Other office people came forward. One woman had a slickie in hand, which she held out with a digital marker. "Can you autograph this for me, Vicereine?"
Vice-what? Tinker felt a smile creeping onto her face in response to all the brightly smiling people gathering around her. The slickie was titled, Tinker, the New Fairy Princess. The cover photo was of Tinker, a crown of flowers disguising her haphazard haircut, looking fey and surprisingly pretty.
"What the hell?" Tinker snatched the slickie from the woman. When in god's name was this taken? And by whom?
She thumbed the page key, flipping through the pictures and text. The first half-dozen photographs were of Windwolf, taken across seasons and at various locations, looking studly as usual. The text listed out Windwolf's titles—viceroy, clan head for Westernlands, cousin to the queen—and added Prince Charming.
"Oh, gag me." She flipped on and found herself. It was a copy of the front cover. When was it taken? She couldn't remember any time appearing in public with a crown of flowers. The only time she had flowers in her hair like this was . . .
Oh, no! Oh, please, no. She frantically flipped on, hoping that she was wrong. Two more head shots, and then there it was—her in her nightgown, the one that looked like cream poured over her naked body. Oh, someone was so dead meat.
The morning after returning from the queen's court, she had breakfasted in the private garden courtyard of Poppymeadow's enclave. She had been alone with the female sekasha—and some pervert with telephoto lens. Thankfully, because of the distance involved, the photo was 2-D with limited pan and zoom features.
"Can you sign it, Vicereine?" the owner of the digital magazine asked.
"Sign?" Tinker slapped the slickie to her chest—she didn't even want to give it back.
The woman held out her marker. "Could you make it out to Jennifer Dunham?"
Tinker stared at the marker, wondering what to do. Certainly she couldn't ask her bodyguards—she suspected that they would not take the invasion of her privacy well. Not that the picture was all that indecent, but more that they had failed to protect her. She fumbled with getting the slickie back to its cover picture without flashing it at her bodyguards, scribbled her name in the corner, and thrust it back.
"I'm here about the broken freezer unit that Lain Shanske called about." Time to escape to something simple, understandable, and easily fixed. This freezer repair sounded like a good greasy project to let her forget all the big, unsolvable problems. "You said that if it was fixed, she could use it."
"That was me that she talked to." One man separated himself from the crowd. "Joseph Wojtowicz, you can call me Wojo, most people do. I'm the general manager here." Halfway through his handshake, he seemed to think he'd made a blunder in etiquette and bowed over her hand. "Yes, if you can get the unit working, she's more than welcome to it."
"Well, let's go see it." Tinker indicated that they should go out of the office, away from the crowd of people who were showing signs of producing cameras. "I want to see if it's actually big enough to hold the tree."
Thus they managed to escape, no picture taken, through the offices and to a backstreet. Stormsong led the way, moving through the maze of turns as if she worked at the offices. Pony trailed behind, keeping back the curious office staff with dark looks.
"I heard about the monster attacking you yesterday." Wojo didn't seem to notice her sekasha, focusing only on Tinker as they rounded a corner and took a short flight of cement steps up onto a loading dock. "Are you okay? It sounds like you had a nasty fight on your hands."
Gods, first Lain and now him. How many people had heard about the fight at Turtle Creek? "I'm fine."
"That's good! That's good! I knew your grandfather, Tim Bell. He was—" Wojo paused to consider a polite way to describe her grandfather. "—quite a character."
"Yeah, he was."
"This is it, here." He stopped before a large door padlocked shut. He pulled out a key ring and started to sort through the keys. "It was our main building before Startup. After that, it was so unpredictable that we only used it for overflow. Four years ago, we stopped being able to use it at all."
By Startup, he meant the first time Pittsburgh went to Elfhome. In typical fashion, Pittsburghers used Startup to mean that first time, and each consecutive time, after Shutdown returned Pittsburgh to Earth. Shutdown itself was a misnomer because the gate never fully shut down, only powered down sharply, a fact that she had counted on when she set out to destroy it. The oni could have stopped the resonance only by completely shutting off the orbital gate, something it wasn't designed to do easily. The poor crew that maintained the gate probably had no clue what was happening or how to stop it. Tinker tried not to think of the poor souls trying to save themselves before the gate shook itself to pieces. Had they abandoned the structure? Were there ships in orbit around Earth that could rescue them? Or had they, too, phased into space over Elfhome, doomed to rain down with the fiery pieces of the gate?
I've killed people, she thought with despair, and I don't even know how many, or what race they belonged to.
"Well, I'll be damned." Wojo turned away from the door, frowning at his key ring as if it had failed him. "None of these keys fit the lock. I guess the key was taken off this ring when we stopped using the building. I'll be right back."
Pony and Stormsong were conferring in whispers. Tinker caught enough to realize that Stormsong was translating for Pony. Was having her sekasha understand everything worth the convenience of not having to repeat herself?
A slight chiming caught Tinker's attention. Across the street sat a small shrine to a local ley god, its prayer bells ringing in the slight breeze.
The gods of the ley were all faces of the god of magic, Auhoya, the god of chaos and plenty. Tinker was never sure how he could be many different gods and yet still be one individual, but she'd learned that with gods, one didn't try to understand like one would with science. They were. Auhoya was shown always with a horn and a two edged-sword. She supposed in some ways, magic was a lot like science, used to make or destroy.
She clapped her hands to call the gods attention to her, bowed low, and added a silver dime to the hoarde already littering the shrine.
"Help me to make things right." Adding a second dime, she whispered, "Help me to never mess up this badly again."
"Tinker ze domi," someone said behind her, using the formal form of her title.
She turned and found Derek Maynard, head of the EIA, standing behind her. If Windwolf was prince of the Westernlands, then Director Maynard was prince of Pittsburgh. Certainly, there was a similarity in their appearance, as Maynard was elf-tall and elf-stylish. He kept his hair in a long, blond braid and wore a painted silk duster, and tall, polished boots. She noted that while he was primarily in white, his accents—earrings, waistcoat, and duster—were all Wind Clan blue.
"Maynard? You're about the last person I expected to run into here. Is the EIA out of ice cream?"
"I'm here to see you." Maynard bowed elegantly, weirding her out. For years she had been terrified of the EIA,
and now its director was treating her like a princess.
"Me?" To her annoyance, the word came out as a squeak. Obviously, someone wasn't completely over her fear.
"I heard of the attack on you yesterday . . ."
"Hell, does everyone in Pittsburgh know about that?"
"Possibly. It made the newspaper. How are you feeling?"
"I wish people would stop asking."
"Forgiveness." He swept a critical gaze down over her, taking in her silk dress, black leather gun belt, and polished riding boots. "I am glad to see you well."
"You chased me down just to see how I was?"
"Yes." He motioned toward the shrine. "Did you convert after Windwolf made you an elf?"
"I was raised in the religion," she said. "My grandfather was an atheist or agnostic, depending on his mood. Tooloo often babysat me when I was a child; she thought if I wasn't watched over by human gods, I should be protected by elfin ones."
"Has anyone ever taught you about human religion?"
"Grandpa taught us to exchange Christmas presents, and Lain lights candles at Hanukkah."
"Lain Shanske? I take it that she's Jewish."
"By blood, although not totally by faith. It seems a weird compulsion that she fights, like she doesn't want to believe, saying she's not going to do Hanukkah, but at the last minute, she pulls out the candles and lights them."
Maynard nodded, as if Lain's behavior wasn't bizarre. "I understand."
"I don't. If you try to talk to her about the Jewish God—one minute she's saying that her god is the only true god, and the next minute, she'll be telling me that scientifically, her creation story is impossible. It's like she wants me to know her religion, but doesn't want me to believe it, because she doesn't believe it—but she does."
"Things that you're told as a child—your fear, your religion, your bigotry—become so much a part of you that's it hard to remove them when you grow to be an adult. Sometimes you don't realize such things are there until the moment of truth, and then they're suddenly as impossible to miss as a third arm, and as hard to cut off."
"You talk like you've been through it."
"There have been a few times when all I could do was kiss dirt and pray."
Stormsong scoffed, reminding Tinker that this wasn't a private conversation. On the heels of that, she remembered that this was the second most important person in Pittsburgh after Windwolf—and he had come looking for her.
"You didn't come here to ask me about my religion."
"Actually, in a way, I had," Maynard said. "You do realize that Pittsburgh's treaty with the elves is now null and void?"
"No. Why would it be void?"
"The basic underlying principle of the treaty is that Pittsburgh was a city of Earth only temporarily visiting Elfhome. Every article was written with the idea that humans would and could return to Earth."
"Shit! Okay, I didn't realize that." She frowned at him, wishing she wasn't so tired. Surely this conversation had to be making some kind of sense, but she was missing the connection. What did her religion have to do with the treaty?
"Little one." Stormsong took out a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and offered Tinker a piece. "He wants to know how human you are after everyone has had a chance to fuck your brain over for the last few months. He needs your help but he doesn't know if he can trust you."
Ooooh. Tinker took the gum to give herself a moment to think.
"Succinct as ever, Stormsong." Maynard also accepted a piece.
"That's why you love me." Stormsong stepped back out of the conversation, becoming elfin again.
The last time Tinker remembered talking with Maynard was before she'd been summoned by the queen. She'd warned him about the oni. Slowly unwrapping the gum, she tried to remember if she had seen Maynard after that. No, the oni had kidnapped her while she was on her way to see him. Yeah, she could see why he might be concerned she'd been somehow—damaged.
That still begged the question of what the hell he expected her to do in regard of negotiating a new treaty. As a business owner, she found all of the regulations set up in the original one to be baffling, perplexing, mystifying, bewildering . . . and any other word that meant confusing.
"Look, I can help with junkyards, hoverbike racing, and advanced physics." She sighed and put the gum in her mouth. For a moment the taste—not Juicy Fruit as she remembered but something similar, only a hundred times better—distracted her. It was like getting kicked in the mouth. "Wow." She checked the bright yellow wrapper in her hand. Oh yes, she was an elf now, and things tasted different.
Maynard was frowning, waiting for her to finish her point.
"Um—" What had she been saying? Oh yes, her areas of expertise. "But I've discovered that I know very little about anything else."
"You're Windwolf's domi."
"And this makes me an expert on—what? I don't know you well enough to discuss my sex life and quite frankly, the only place I get to see my husband is in bed."
"Whether you like it or not, ze domi, that makes you a player in Pittsburgh. There are sixty thousands humans that need you on their side."
"Fine, I'm on their side. Rah, rah, rah! That still doesn't give me a clue on how to help. Fuck, I tried to help the elves and look at the mess I made. You can't screw up much more than Turtle Creek."
"A lot of elves see this as a win-win situation. If you had permanently returned Pittsburgh back to Earth, it would have been perfect."
"Some of us would have been pissed," Stormsong said.
Maynard gave Stormsong a look that begged her to be quiet.
"Look," Tinker said. "If shit hits the fan, I promise I will move heaven and earth to protect the people of this city, but I am not a political animal. At this point in time, I don't even want to try to tackle anything that can't be solved with basic number crunching."
Maynard was still gazing at Stormsong, but in a more intent fashion now. Stormsong wore an odd stunned look, like someone had hit her with a cattle prod.
"Stormsong?" Tinker scanned the area, looking for danger.
"You will," Stormsong murmured softly in a voice that put chills down Tinker's spine.
"I will what?" Tinker shivered off the feeling.
"Move heaven and earth to protect what you love," Stormsong whispered.
"What the hell does that mean?" Tinker asked.
Stormsong blinked and focused on Tinker. "Forgiveness, ze domi," she said in High Elvish, disappearing behind her most formal mask. "My ability is erratic and I'm untrained. I—I am not certain . . ."
"If that's the case, I'm satisfied." Maynard acted as if Stormsong had said something more understandable. "Forgiveness, ze domi, I must take my leave. Nasadae."
"Nasadae," Tinker echoed, mystified. What the fuck just happened? Maynard bowed his parting. Stormsong had gone into sekasha mode. And the conversation had been in English, so asking Pony would be pointless.
Wojo returned with the keys. "I see you've found the cause of all our problems." He indicated the shrine marking the ley line. "As soon as the magic seeped into the area after the first Startup, the whole unit went whacky. It was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen—including waking up the day before."
"Huh?" She was having trouble switching gears. That's it, I won't fight any monsters today and will go to bed early.
Wojo misunderstood her grunt of confusion. "I lived out in West View right on the Rim—almost didn't come with the rest of the city. My place looked down on I-279. Every morning, I'd get up, have coffee, and check traffic out my back window. That first Startup, I looked out, and there was nothing but trees. I thought maybe I was dreaming. I actually went and took a cold shower before going back and looking again."
Tinker added a shower and maybe a nightcap to her "must get sleep" list—if she could find either.
"I never realized how noisy the highway was until afterward," Wojo continued blithely. "When the forest is still, it's absolute quiet, like the world is wrapped in cotton. And the
wind through the trees—that green smell—I just love it."
Tinker bet Stormsong would know where to find booze and hot water.
"But between the wargs, the saurus, and the black willows, West View was just too isolated—I was way out past the scientist commune on Observatory Hill. It's all ironwood forest now. I have a nice place up on Mount Washington, beautiful view of the city, and it's much safer up there. And hell, with gas prices what they are, it makes sense to take the incline down the hill and take the light rail over."
"Yeah, yeah," Tinker agreed to shut him up and indicated the door. "Let's see what you have."
Wojo unlocked the padlock, freed it from the bolt, and opened the door.
Before her transformation, ley lines seemed nearly mystical—lines of force running like invisible rivers. The little shrines erected by the elves on strong ley lines served as the only warning for why the normal laws of physics would suddenly skew off in odd directions, as the chaos of magic was applied to the equation. "I hit a ley" embedded itself into the Pittsburgh language, blaming everything from acts of nature to bad judgment on the unseen presence.