Crow Boy made a small hurt sound. “I had family on the Minghe Hao.”
“Maybe Esme saved them.” Louise offered what little comfort she could. “The colony ships are massive. We’re looking at only a small section of the Minghe Hao.”
It was enough, though, to wreak havoc on Earth. The television was showing complete panic as the pieces rained down. No one else had yet identified the debris. The news was still calling it “the gate.” The Minghe Hao’s missing engines had aimed the ship at American’s heartland prior to being sheared off. Remains of the water-treatment system struck the town of Bellbrook, Ohio, with such force that the reporters were stating “possible nuclear weapon” to describe the destruction.
“The gate is gone!” Jillian tossed her tablet aside and began to pace around the room in long, man-length strides. She was fleeing into the character of Captain Hilts as fast as she could. “Even if the gate wasn’t what fell, it’s not in Earth-space anymore. It’s probably wherever the rest of the Minghe Hao is, and that can’t be a good thing. The Minghe Hao hit something!”
Jillian was desperately trying to be strong. Now that Louise knew the signs, it was all so clear. Her twin was trying to press her lips into Hilts’ thin, confident sneer, but they kept trembling. She threw herself onto the couch, trying for the soldier’s seemingly carefree slouch. “We’re not talking rush hour on the George Washington Bridge here. There’s not a lot of shit to hit in space.”
All completely true.
Statistically, whatever accident shattered the Minghe Hao most likely had also claimed the gate. The structure had been built in space, spiderweb-delicate and carefully balanced. It hadn’t been designed to take a hard blow and recover. The gate had small positioning-correction thrusters but it wouldn’t be able to save itself if it had been smashed out of its orbit.
If something had gone horribly wrong over Elfhome—and all evidence pointed that way—the gate had been lost. Without it, the magic that linked the two worlds was broken. The great ironwood forest would forever be on Earth and Pittsburgh was lost.
It was frighteningly huge, and Louise didn’t know what they could do. All her hopes had been pinned on the idea that they would find the tengu children, free them, fly over the quarantine zone next Shutdown in hovercarts, and in short order be with Alexander and Windwolf. She had found a great deal of comfort thinking that powerful, unflappable Prince Yardstick would be protecting them. All they had to do was to get to his side and all would be over.
Now she had no idea what they should do.
But Louise did know that they couldn’t do nothing. They were standing out in the middle of a freeway. They had to move or be mowed down by everything hurtling at them with murderous speed.
Or more correctly, Louise had to do something.
At the mansion, right after their parents had died, Jillian had been too broken to pretend anything. She’d pasted all her broken bits back together, but the cracks were all still there. The promise of escape to Elfhome was the only glue that was keeping Jillian in one piece.
With that promise gone, the cracks were coming undone.
Jillian covered her mouth to hide the betraying tremble of lips and stood back up. The hurt lost look was filling her eyes as her control crumbled more. “Where—where’s my ball?”
Crow Boy staggered back to the window like someone had hit him with a sledgehammer. Super ninja or not, he was still just a fourteen-year-old boy, stranded on a world full of enemies. “What are we going to do?”
“We fall back to Plan B,” Louise stated as calmly as she could.
“We have a Plan B?” Crow Boy asked.
“We don’t, but the elves will have one. They probably knew that the gate could be damaged in an accident at any time—or the Chinese might be forced to actually abandon the colony program—or Queen Soulful Ember might figure out what they were doing and somehow blast the gate out of orbit. Feng was told years ago what to do in case of emergency. They have plans. Long-thought-out plans.”
“Okay.” Jillian breathed like she was willing to grab hold of any lifeline thrown to her.
“Yves is finding out right now that Shutdown isn’t going to happen.” Louise ignored the fact that Jillian whimpered and Crow Boy gasped as if she’d hit him. “He’ll switch to Plan B, and that involves getting to Elfhome another way.”
“No, no, no!” Jillian cried, her voice breaking. She covered her face with her hands, hiding her weakness as logic tore away hope. “If they had another way, they wouldn’t be trying to kidnap Alexander.”
“They want Alexander because there isn’t another way to Onihida,” Louise lied quickly to cut that fear off but then realized that she was right. “The tengu were isolated because the pathways from Onihida to Earth had been blocked.”
“By the dragons,” Crow Boy explained, “to try and isolate Onihida, but it didn’t work. They missed one path, but after the war, the elves pulled down all the pathways, even the ones between Earth and Elfhome.”
“See! See! Ming’s army is on Onihida! The island we blew up was the only way for his army to get to Earth. He would still need to get his soldiers from the China Sea to Monroeville first.”
“You blew up Pejamu Island?” Crow Boy cried in surprise.
“Parts of it.” Louise waved him away from distracting her argument. “The elves only blocked the pathways that they knew—”
“The caves!” Jillian cried.
“Yes,” Crow Boy said. “The pathway was in a cave.”
“No!” Jillian waved her arms frantically. “Remember all the maps of caves that Esme had? I bet Plan B is to go to Elfhome via caves.”
They’d ruled that out. Louise didn’t want to crush Jillian, though, not when she was so fragile.
“It would be difficult,” Crow Boy stated. “But they could do it.”
The twins turned to look at him with surprise. “What?”
“They found several cave systems in Westernlands that lead to Elfhome, only all the pathways were much too small to be useful. They took the worst and tried to expand the passages. It turns out that any construction destroys the pathway; the connection between the worlds is cut completely.” They stared at him in silence until he added, “The ones they attempted to expand had been too small for even a child to use. The ones that remain, you can squeeze a person through.”
“Child” made Louise think of the tengu children. Yves had been calmly sorting through the mansion’s treasures, keeping what would be useful for the takeover of Elfhome. He’d keep the children alive if he could still get them to Elfhome.
“Where are these pathways?” Jillian asked.
Crow Boy deflated, shaking his head. “I don’t know. We only know of their failures. They otherwise kept the natural pathways secret from us.”
Louise could almost see the cracks in Jillian’s composure widening. “Yves would want to stay as close to Pittsburgh as possible. That’s where all their resources are centered.” Louise did a quick search. There were fewer than a dozen caves listed for Pennsylvania, most of them more than a hundred miles from the quarantine zone. Only one was close. “Laurel Caverns. Was that one of the caves that Esme had a map to?”
“Yes, it was.” Nikola tilted his head, searching out data. “Desmarais bought it from Randolph Humbert in 1861, when it was known as Dulaney’s Cave, and he changed the name. Desmarais opened it as a show cave in 1961.”
“If they didn’t sell the cave after exploring it carefully, then there’s a pathway,” Crow Boy said. “It most likely is only big enough for a person to crawl through. They could send scouts through and some camping gear, but nothing larger.”
Between predators like wyverns and wargs, man-eating plants and rivers full of sharks, Elfhome’s wilderness wasn’t someplace you could live with just a tent and sleeping bag. “They wanted to take over the Eastern Hemisphere of Elfhome. A pup tent in the middle of the Western Hemisphere would seem to be wasted effort. At least, until the first Startup. Afte
rwards, though, they could have used it as a secret back door to Pittsburgh. They could have a fortress built over the cave on the other side.”
“A back door only stays secret if you don’t advertise it.” When the twins stared at him in surprise again, Crow Boy elaborated. “The oni do not play well with others, even other oni. I have not heard of there being a pathway near Pittsburgh, so it is possible that they have kept it for emergencies only. Plan B.”
That was good news at least: a way to Elfhome that wasn’t heavily guarded.
In a matter of minutes they had everything to be known about Laurel Caverns spread across the dozen monitors and their two tablets.
Nikola tilted his head back and forth. “Their website says that they host fieldtrips, caving tours, Girl Scout events, gemstone panning, and something called Kavernputt.” He tilted his head a couple more times in confusion. “Oh, it’s miniature golf in a cave, entirely handicap-accessible.”
For a secret back door, it sounded overrun with humans. Maybe Crow Boy was wrong. Maybe Ming had kept the caverns just because they made him money.
“Putt-putt?” Jillian obviously was trying to link miniature golf with plans of global conquest. “There’s something very twisted about a bad guy hiding out at a putt-putt course.”
“Oh!” Nikola cried. “Their website just posted that they will be closed to the public. It says they’re going to be renovating the gift shops and lighting systems.”
Louise breathed out in relief. “Yves just fell back to Plan B.”
“You didn’t say anything about ostriches,” Crow Boy said.
In the scramble to implement “Highjack Plan B,” Louise had left finding transportation to the babies. At first glance the box truck, painted fire-engine red, had seemed a bit flashy, but it did match the specifications she’d given them. She’d assumed that the tall, matching red, livestock box on the back was empty.
Crow Boy’s puzzled look after he’d climbed up into the high cab warned her that she was wrong.
“Ostriches?” Louise scrambled up beside him. To her dismay, the back window of the truck afforded a view of eight ostriches. They studied Louise back with large soft brown eyes and thick eyelashes. They were the most beautiful eyes Louise had ever seen. “Oh no!”
“Chuck!” Jillian cried. Louise wasn’t sure how Jillian decided it was Chuck’s fault.
Nikola cringed, but it was Chuck who defended the choice. “You said we needed a self-driven truck with combination locks on cargo pods, fully fueled.”
“Someone is going to notice it’s missing!” Jillian cried.
“They haven’t yet. And we wanted to see the ostriches. We’ve never seen one before! We haven’t seen any animals.”
Louise sighed. The babies didn’t have enough experience to understand cause and effect. It worried Louise, not just because of what they might do, but because of what she might miss. She might be smart as a rocket scientist, but she didn’t have twenty years of learning how the world really worked. She was gambling all their lives that she understood things enough to see a way to safety.
“What do we do?” Crow Boy asked.
Louise took a deep breath and swung the door closed. “We need to get moving; we’re running on a time table.”
Nikola pressed his nose to the window and stared in fascination at the ostriches. They stared back, seemingly equally fascinated.
Jillian eyed the ostriches with open suspicion. “What are we going to do with eight ostriches?”
“Play with them?” Nikola suggested.
Louise knew that was impossible, although a tiny part of her wished they could. “If we don’t need the cages, we’ll set the truck back on its original course with the pride.”
“Pride?” Jillian echoed in confusion.
“Groups of ostriches are called prides,” Louise said.
“Like lions?” Jillian said.
One of the Jawbreakers said, “Evidence has been found to show lions in Africa have been kicked in the head by ostriches and had their jaws broken and starved to death.”
Jillian gave Louise a dark look. “We’re in a truck filled with lion killers?”
It didn’t seem nearly as fun when Jillian put it that way.
“Hello!” Joy pressed against the glass to look up at the big birds. “Who’s there?” She tilted her head back and forth. “Oh, no one’s home.”
Jillian snorted.
“That’s not nice,” Louise said. “They’re just not as smart as you.”
* * *
The cavern’s entrance was marked with a low split-rail fence and a giant arrow sitting on a rough stone slab. There had been a barrier with a “closed” sign attached to it, but that had been run over. Louise wished they could have stopped and reconsidered, but they were already committed. Crow Boy had flown ahead, and their first attack was already underway. The truck’s auto-drive put on turn signals, slowed, and gracefully turned into the driveway. Their truck thumped over the fallen barrier. Her heart started to race. She wished she could take Jillian’s hand and hold it tight, but she didn’t want her twin to know how scared she was. Louise gripped her hands together.
The two-mile-long driveway climbed up the steep ridge and crested in a large parking lot. Their two other trucks sat near the low-slung stone and wood-planked visitor center. The ten thousand robotic mice were still pouring endlessly out of the back of the mouse truck. Unlike the prototypes, the factory-built mice were dark brown. There were two people on the ground, twitching, and one running for the visitor center with a thousand mice on his heels.
“Get him!” Louise pointed at the last fleeing elf. “Get him.”
“We’re working on it!” Nikola cried.
“Hooyah!” Chuck Norris cried as the male tumbled to the ground. “Score!”
Three down, Louise thought, how many to go?
Crow Boy suddenly appeared in the sky, swooping down onto the fallen elves. For a moment, Louise’s heart stopped, thinking he was going to strike them with the machete they’d bought at Home Depot. When he landed, though, he whipped out a handful of the twenty-four-inch zip ties and used them to hogtie the male.
“Pull over by Crow Boy,” Louise instructed. They’d specified a locking cargo section on the truck so they could hold and transport prisoners if they needed to. If the tengu children weren’t here, they might have to question prisoners at length.
The truck stopped next to the fallen elves. The twins scrambled down out of the cab.
“Nikola, you stay with Tesla; keep him out of danger.” Louise took three of the white mice from her pocket and placed them on the ground. “Girls, you three control the brown mice, but keep them close. If they get out of range of Tesla, their own AI will take over and we might not get them back.”
Each mouse had a seek-and-neutralize program that would have them taser any humanoid object that wasn’t wearing a “friend” transponder. Their programming also allowed them to be linked into large groups acting as one unit. With the babies herding them, the mice would actually end up in the caverns instead of wandering the neighboring woods, tasering hapless hikers.
“Roger!” Chuck snapped. “Team Mischief, go!”
“Jillian, unload the luggage mules.” Louise pointed Jillian toward the truck that had the rest of their gear. Away from the elves. Away from the violence. Jillian nodded, trying to look anywhere but at the bound males.
Only once Jillian was out of earshot did Louise ask quietly, “Are there any other elves in the area?”
Crow Boy shook his head. “The one outbuilding is an equipment shed and the other is a picnic shelter. There’s no one in either one. If there’s more elves, they’re inside the caverns.”
“Any sign of the nestlings?”
Hurt flashed across his face. He took something out of his pocket and held it out to her. It was a small plushie of a black bird. “This is Lai Yee’s. It was on the ground in the equipment shed, but it could have simply fallen out of a truck.”
&nb
sp; It only meant that the little girl had been moved in a vehicle that then came to the caverns. Lai Yee, though, might have been taken out of the truck someplace else.
“We’ll find them,” Louise promised.
While he hogtied and gagged the other fallen elves, Louise sorted through the spells they’d preprinted. They’d made copies of every spell that might be useful, from shields to detection to healing ones like the ones they’d cast on Crow Boy. She found the scry spell and laid it on the warm asphalt of the parking lot. Taking out four magic generators, she connected them to the spell via the power leads. With the increased power input, the scry spell would reach further.
With a word, she activated the spell. With the extra power, a massive dome gleamed to life over the paper. The parking lot flared on the surface, a brilliant dot of confusion as the spell attempted to highlight all the living objects from the ostriches down to the twins. The gift shop was a tangle of metal, rending the building unreadable to the spell. The magic poured down through the caves, though, painting the deep maze hidden under the rolling hills around them. With the parking lot to mark the scale, the sheer size of the cave system was intimidating.
“There they are!” Jillian cried, pointing not at the spell but to a point somewhere to the right.