44: WHEN A BOX IS NOT A BOX
The OPEN sign in Tooloo’s shop window was swinging back and forth. Tooloo must have flipped it seconds before Pony pulled the Rolls-Royce into the parking lot. It meant that Tooloo had known that they were coming.
Tinker wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad. It meant that she didn’t need to break in and steal an old woman’s bed with possible interference from her morally superior Hand, but at the same time, she would have to actually talk to Tooloo. She expected Tooloo to be Tooloo: noncooperative, insulting, and possibly lying to Tinker’s face.
Tinker stared at the swinging sign and wondered if she should tell her Hand to stay outside. It would be bad if the sekasha snapped and took a swipe at the old bat. Then again, if Tooloo was Vision, it was unlikely that they would land a hit. Still, annoying as Tooloo was, she was the closest thing to a grandmother that Tinker had.
Wait. Does this mean Stormsong is my cousin?
Stormsong noticed Tinker jolting in surprise as the connection was made. “Domi?”
“I’m fine, it’s nothing, let’s go,” Tinker said hurriedly and got out of the Rolls-Royce.
In the space of three months, she had gone from just Oilcan as her only family to having relatives coming out of her ears. Loving husband. Crafty lying grandmother. Overprotective grandfather. Time-traveling mother. Secretive aunt. Murderous undercover half aunts. (Was half aunts even a thing?) Child uncles. Twin younger sisters. Impossible baby siblings. Now a very distant cousin. What was with this summer? Was there a fire sale that no one told her about? Buy one relative, get a dozen free?
Riki pulled in beside her, driving the flatbed from her salvage yard.
Tooloo’s dragon-bone bed was a big wonky thing. It wasn’t going to fit in the Rolls-Royce. Tinker had debated driving the flatbed herself since none of the sekasha could drive manual transmission. In the end, she decided that having a morally flexible tengu in tow would be a good thing. She had dragooned Riki into driving the salvage yard’s flatbed. (Oilcan had been using it all day so they had to stop at Montana’s gas station to fill it up.)
“Huh,” Riki said. “I’ve never seen this place open before.”
Which could only mean that Tooloo had been hiding from the tengu. It was probably better that Riki didn’t go in with them. The fewer innocent bystanders in the mix, if it all boiled over, the better.
“Stay here,” she told Riki.
It was the same dimly lit, dusty shop full of random treasure that she remembered from her childhood. Some of the items had sat unmoved on the shelves her entire life. She thought that she knew the store well. Every time she’d been in there that summer, though, she saw it with new eyes.
Today was no different. She had built forts under the big bed as a child, crawling under the bracing of pale yellow “wood” that made up the frame. For the first time she looked at the bed and recognized the bones for what they were. Rib cage. Femurs. Hips.
What’s more, the dragon shown coiled on the kitchenette’s tile mosaic was the same orange-gold color as Box.
“Silly beast died without the magic,” Tooloo had claimed the first time Tinker visited as an elf. “I was tempted to burn my bed after the Pathway reopened, but waste not, want not, as the humans say.”
Was that a lie? If it wasn’t, then Tinker should be able to take the bed without a fight. Right?
Tooloo was sitting in the same armchair as Tinker’s last visit, holding a delicate china teacup full of fragrant Earl Grey tea. Tooloo didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the sudden invasion. She was wearing a different worn fairy-silk gown—the rose one with delicate threadbare needlework—but her normal red high-top tennis shoes. Her white hair was braided into a thick cord that came down over her chest to pool in her lap. Now that Tinker had Lain, Esme, and Louise to compare her to, she could see the family resemblance in the determined chin. The chessboard had been banished from the table without a trace. That was fine with Tinker; she’d never liked the game anyhow.
“I’m here for the bed and the chicken,” Tinker said.
Tooloo raised her teacup, took a sip, and then eyed Tinker over its rim. “Have you brought me a replacement bed? You don’t expect me to sleep on the floor?”
“I’m not taking the mattress.” Tinker waved at the lumpy queen-sized mattress strewn with warg skins. “It can sit on the floor until I find a replacement frame.”
“I did not think I raised you to be inconsiderate to a little old lady,” Tooloo said.
“You’re not little and you’re not a lady,” Tinker snarled. Tooloo was nearly a foot taller than her. She stomped back to the front door to shout to Riki. “Go find me a queen-sized bed frame. Oilcan only got twin-sized ones from Once More With Feeling, so there might be some there.”
“Yes, domi.” Riki started up the flatbed to make it so.
Tinker returned to Tooloo. They had at least half an hour before Riki had any hope of returning with a bedframe. “Why the puzzle with the chess pieces? Why not just give me the bed when I was here last time?”
“I didn’t want to sleep on the floor.” Tooloo took another sip of her tea. “Besides, it wouldn’t have fit in that fancy car you came in and you had better things to do, like win a battle.”
Tinker flailed her hands with all the points she wanted to scream. “Why not just tell me?”
Tooloo shook her head. “It’s like trying to explain composing a symphony to someone who can barely pick out “Chopsticks” on a keyboard.”
Tinker knew about the song only because she was an occasional roadie for Naekanain. “Chopsticks” was the tune that idiots liked to play on Maya’s keyboard to show off that they knew “how to play too.” Since Maya had a strict “no touch” policy for her instrument, this did not go over like the idiots thought it would.
“I do not play the keyboard,” Tinker said.
“Yes, that’s been obvious since you were born,” Tooloo said.
“For once, can you just explain what it is that you want?”
“Will it make any difference? Won’t you just go off and do whatever you think is for the best?”
This was how Tinker expected the conversation to go. “Can you at least explain to me what Pure Radiance wants so I don’t help her out again? She basically tossed me to the oni and let me figure it out on my own. Why did she have you bound hand and foot with a dragon guard dog? Is it because she wants Elfhome to be isolated from the other worlds?”
“The thing that my daughter failed to understand was that despite being broken down and scattered to the four winds, our genetic donors would never abandon any little part of themselves that remained. Trying to explain it to her would have resulted in her just gathering up the shards of our antecedents and finding some way to end them completely. Pure Radiance has always been wholly elf with all the frailties that implies.”
“So all this madness—the last two or three thousand years—has been about the twelve baby dragons trapped in the nactka?”
Tooloo snorted into her tea. “If our antecedents would listen to reason, none of them would have come to Elfhome in the first place.”
“Couldn’t you just send them home?”
“The shards? Just wait. You’ll soon see how difficult they are to deal with.”
“But…but…the gate and Pittsburgh? It has nothing to do with anything?”
“Oh, that was all key to my plan. The society that my daughter crafted will not be acceptable to the dragon children who came to Elfhome. It’s too rigid. Too unfair to the individual in the name of protecting the masses. Ironically, it echoes the confines of the dragon society that the children were rebelling against on Ryu.”
“Clarity came to Elfhome as an angsty teenager pissed at her parents?”
Tooloo made a dismissive noise. “I—She told the antecedents it was too dangerous. Nirvana was first to ignore Clarity, wanting to spread hope to the captive elves. Brilliance charged in to save her, always sure that he could outthink any problem. Honor trotted behind, sure that Brilliance will find a way, blinded by love. Even Solitude and Muse eventually joined in. It was cascading into a disaster across multiple worlds. As it was, Onihida was lost when the Skin Clan started to step across worlds. Earth would have slowly been won over despite the lack of magic. Ryu would be invaded by its own twisted grandchildren. Worlds that you have yet to hear about would follow. The evil needed to be stopped on Elfhome.”
“The whole chessboard thing?”
Tooloo smiled slyly.
“What? Did you do that just to tease me?”
“No, of course not,” Tooloo said—still smiling. “I needed to compose a symphony. Don’t mistake your plinking on a keyboard as understanding the process. There was much more to the music than your little ‘Chopstick’ solo.”
Tinker gritted her teeth, mindful that even Stormsong looked slightly annoyed. Rainlily looked outraged. (Did they ever explain to Rainlily who Tooloo really was? Surely Pony and Stormsong had filled her in.)
Tinker seemed to have guessed right on the bed—or at least, Tooloo was letting her believe that she had. It made too much sense. There was the ley line that flowed through the living space, pooling in a strong warm presence that brushed over Tinker’s bare legs. There was no really good reason for Tooloo to camp on a ley line except to keep the dragon bones seeped in magic.
“Box is the dragon Vigilance?”
Tooloo sniffed. “I suppose you could call Vigilance a dragon. He is not a shard, per se. Our cruel creators were starting to realize how strongly the antecedent’s personality would influence the derivatives. They expected infants who would be easy to manipulate. What they got were echoes of the antecedents.”
Tooloo waved a hand toward the bed. “Vigilance was an attempt to strip off the base personality from a genotype. It would be like stripping a human back to what you call the ‘primitive reptile brain.’ What they got was a four-claw dragon. The Skin Clan might have seen me as an elf, as did my idiot daughter, but other dragons know what I am. I am a five-claw dragon. No four-claw dragon would ever dare to harm me.”
Malice had been a four-claw dragon. Impatience was a five-claw.
“Impatience said that he couldn’t take Malice in a fight,” Tinker said.
“He said that he couldn’t fight Malice,” Tooloo said, “in that he had been forbidden to fight by our elders. He could do nothing more than save his own life if it was in immediate danger. He’s done what he can within the limits of the edict but it’s allowed him very little wiggle room. If he did more, he would not be allowed to return home. The loss of one’s home world to an immortal is soul crushing. Centuries of longing for what you can never have again.”
Tooloo had talked about years of lying in her dragon bed, too depressed to move. She understood the pain that Impatience would face if he were exiled from Ryu.
“How would the dragons even know?” Tinker complained. “They don’t seem to be paying any attention to what’s happened to their children beyond Impatience and Providence. Even Providence’s mate seems unconcerned over what has happened to their child.”
Tooloo laughed dryly. “What a monkey answer. Your curiosity is endless. The reasons why Providence’s mate has done nothing are none of your concern. Believing that others are not acting outside of your awareness is how Brilliance got himself killed. Remember, just because you are not aware of the world does not mean that it doesn’t exist.”
“So, the dragons are paying attention but not doing anything?”
“Yes. Sight is a dragon’s gift. There are those who can peer between the worlds. Just because you can see the falling tree, however, does not mean that you realize it’s about to take out your house. Otherwise intelligent beings can convince themselves and others that they are above cause and effect. They knew that the Skin Clan was deadly but they were sure that they could contain the evil to one world. Onihida was lost because of that belief. Ryu would have been lost too if Clarity hadn’t acted—but she’s been condemned for her actions instead of praised.”
That had to burn. To give yourself up to be torn apart and turned into enslaved twisted versions of your true self—and then cast as evil for that sacrifice.
Oh, damn, she’s making me feel like a hypocrite for being mad at her.
* * *
To escape her feelings, Tinker stomped outside to capture Box. He made it easy. As if he’d forgotten their entire nine-year history with each other, he came at her like she was a complete stranger out to steal eggs and hens.
“Ow! Ow! No, don’t kill him! We need him alive! Box! Rainlily!”
* * *
They escaped half an hour later—once Riki returned with a replacement frame and headboard—with one ugly bone bed and one pissed-off rooster.
There. She’d solved the chess puzzle. Forge could cast the spell and fix the domana.
But that didn’t seem like it addressed what Tooloo wanted to do.
If Windwolf had been right, then the fight between Pure Radiance and Tooloo had been about the structure of the elf society. Certainly Tooloo had brushed over that at one point.
That Tooloo was allowing Tinker to fix the domana probably meant that undoing the power structure of elf society completely wasn’t her end goal. Perhaps it was nothing more than to make everyone aware that the war was won not by elves like Cana Lily—clinging to old roles—but Windwolf, Tinker, and Oilcan, who forged new alliances. The young elves coming to Pittsburgh had been desperate for a new life. They arrived just to find that the new land held to the same old structures where they had no place. They survived only because humans had reached out in friendship.
But the locals could only do so much. The Skin Clan had made it difficult for humans to stay on the planet if not funded by an Earth-based company. They limited education, technology, equipment, and visas that would have expanded Pittsburgh’s ability to maintain its human population. Her grandfather learned of her Aunt Ada’s death one month but couldn’t leave until the next. Oilcan had drifted between foster homes for nearly three months before being rescued from that system. Tinker had been handed over to Lain for the thirty-plus days it took for her grandfather to queue up for leaving, get Oilcan, and then come back to Elfhome. One mishap at the border would have meant it would have taken two months for him to return.
Pittsburgh was barely working for anyone prior to this summer. She would wait for days or weeks for Shutdown to put in an order and then wait another month or two for it to be delivered. Everyone she knew struggled against a system that seemed built to work against them. Blue Sky could never see his mother again. Half the kids they grew up with left Elfhome for colleges off-world because the education system in Pittsburgh was so limited, and didn’t return because there were no jobs. Sean Roach had left Elfhome at eighteen and then fought with red tape for an entire year to be allowed to come back home. Moser’s band had to jump through hoops to sell their albums on Earth. Geoffrey Kryskill struggled to export his furniture. All the scientists who came and went on Observatory Hill spent years working through red tape to be allowed less than thirty days of research.
Pittsburgh didn’t work. It was probably all Pure Radiance and the Skin Clan’s fault. No one on Earth would benefit from making it as difficult as it was to travel between the worlds.
Tinker had started plans to make Squirrel Hill Tunnel into a gate but she’d abandoned it. Yes, some of it was because she was afraid that she would open up a hole to the oni army on Onihida, but mostly because she didn’t feel like she had a right to decide the future of the world on her own. (Okay, because she’d ripped the orbital gate out of the sky without asking anyone, she had been sitting back and waiting for the Queen or someone give her permission.) Well, screw that. This was Pittsburgh and she was its domi. Pure Radiance wasn’t going to give her that permission, so she was going to have to take it while the female was distracted by the war.
At least with Forge, the twins, and a dozen dragons underfoot, she should be able to get lots of help to do it quickly.