31: STANDING DOWN
Since the moment that Jane had opened fire on the oni holding Boo captive at Sandcastle, she knew that she was in danger from the EIA. She’d killed an intelligent being. So many that she’d lost count. Yes, the elves would forgive her and even approve, but the United Nations had quietly changed the definition of “murder” within human laws. The wording now read “human, elf, or member of any yet unidentified sapient race.” (Yes, she did discover the change afterward. No, it wouldn’t have stopped her even if she knew beforehand.) Most likely the oni slipped the wording in just to tie the hands of humans. Many of her kills were head shots from a distance, so she couldn’t claim self-defense. Worst of all, there been no formal declaration of war from any side.
Jane’s team had nearly been arrested at Three Rivers Stadium after killing the namazu with her family’s cannon. According to the EIA lieutenant who showed up with Sparrow and a Hand of Windwolf’s sekasha, they had broken numerous human laws, starting with simply owning the cannon. What really put the lieutenant’s nose out of joint was the fact that Jane had turned the first floor of the EIA’s pristine crystal castle into so much broken glass. (She still wasn’t sure what Director Maynard’s take on the damage was, but he couldn’t have been totally pleased.)
At the museum, Maynard would have arrested Jane’s team except for the intervention of Queen Soulful Ember. He chose to accept their self-defense claim because only Jane was armed and the disguised oni warriors had opened fire on his men instead of surrendering. Since then, two NSA agents, Corg Durrack and Hannah Briggs, had acted as her unofficial overseers, checking in on her team often to make sure they weren’t blowing up city landmarks. Jane doubted very much that the two weren’t aware of her clandestine activities, but it was possible that they didn’t feel the need to report them to Maynard. They were all about “truth, justice, and the American way,” which included a heavily armed civilian population. The EIA was a United Nation organization. Jane suspected that the federal agents were willing to cooperate with the EIA—but only to a limit.
Jane had known when she started to build the militia in secret that she was heading for a confrontation with Director Maynard. It was said that Maynard had a strong a sense of honor; it was why Windwolf demanded that Maynard headed up the EIA after the treaty was signed. But Maynard would need to deal with the large percentage of humans who hadn’t shown up to defend the city. Ambassadors. Embassy staff. Businessmen. Locals. All of them chafed at the restrictions that the elves had put on access to Elfhome’s resources. All of them might believe that those restrictions would have been lifted by the oni. They might have even been promised peaceful trade for cooperation with the oni. They would want the letter of the law followed. They might demand that the militia be disbanded and its organizers punished.
She had known that, sooner or later, she was going to have to deal with Maynard. She just didn’t want to deal with him first thing in the morning after the third-worst day of her life.
The night before, she had pulled the militia out as the royal marines flooded into Oakland. The chance for friendly fire from the elves was too high. There had already been a half dozen militia killed by the oni. All people she knew. All under thirty. Some of them had left spouses and children. All left family who would grieve them. Nearly a hundred more had been wounded, overflowing Mercy Hospital. The number of dead and wounded without Oilcan and Tinker fighting would have been staggering.
She and her team had retreated to WQED. Taggart, Nigel, and Hal had worked late into the night creating short news segments that would hopefully sway the people who thought that humans could stay neutral in the war. Each segment had two versions; one with Hal narrating and the other with captions explaining the action that could be used by the other television channels. They had also finished editing the footage for the Monsters in Our Midst episode on black willows.
Jane coordinated with her brothers and Yumiko. They pieced together what exactly had happened since the start of fighting. There had been a lot more going on in the city than she’d been aware of, some of it inexplicable, like Law Monroe spotting Kajo and a body double east of Oakland, Olive Branch charging back and forth across the city in a stolen truck, and Tinker’s twin little sisters showing up at Allegheny Graveyard.
Around two in the morning, Jane and the men finished up their projects and slept on the floor in the Neighborhood of Make Believe studio. They woke up stiff and sore but glad to be alive. First order of business was to take Chesty out for a walk and to find something to eat. It was a typical autumn morning: chilly, clear pale sky, weak sun, colorful leaves drifting on a slight breeze. The Rim was surreal with barricades of debris, randomly parked vehicles of the wounded left abandoned, and the smell of gun smoke heavy in the air. Royal marines and EIA troops were scattered in pools of bright red and camouflage green.
Ellen’s Tiny Deli was parked a block down from Poppymeadows, serving tea and breakfast to militia stragglers. She had eggs scrambled with roasted carrots and red peppers, fried onions, and goat cheese. She served them up with homemade wild boar bacon, sliced apples, and fresh biscuits.
“They all got turned around in the dark and rain.” Ellen McMicking explained the stragglers to Jane. “They decided to hunker down under shelter instead of stumbling around lost. They’ve been trickling in since dawn.”
“Thanks for taking care of them.” Jane attempted to pay for their food.
“No, no, no,” Ellen said. “Think of it as an early wedding present!”
Chesty rumbled a warning that someone was incoming with a weapon.
She didn’t recognize Director Maynard at first. As a true military leader, he blended in with the other soldiers at the Rim, making him less of a sniper’s target. He was in EIA combat gear instead of his typical elvish-styled flair. A Kevlar helmet made his long hair less noticeable. He had on a modular tactical vest instead of his normal elaborately embordered waistcoat. His normal painted silk duster was missing. He carried a rifle with the ease of a soldier.
There was no missing, however, the intent on his face.
The first time they’d met at Sandcastle, he’d mostly ignored her, focusing instead on Nigel and Hal. He’d wanted a botanist to give him advice on the namazu. At the museum gunfight, he’d shifted to her as if he had guessed that she made the tactical decisions for the group. Today, he totally ignored the men.
“Ms. Kryskill,” Maynard said in greeting. “We need to talk.”
“Yes, I believe we do,” Jane said, even though it was the last thing that she really wanted to do. Her mother would go on a rampage if Jane missed her own wedding because she was in jail.
“I had a long debriefing with Captain Josephson this morning,” Maynard said. “If I understand him correctly, you’re a close personal friend of Tinker domi?”
“I’ve known her for years,” Tinker had said. “I trust her completely.”
It hadn’t been a surprising proclamation; Tinker was only ten when she met Roach, Geoffrey, and Andy. It was just a month or two after Boo’s kidnapping. Jane’s whole family had been extremely protective of the little orphan girl suddenly in their midst. They had given Tinker and Oilcan an open door to their homes and lives.
While it had only been two sentences spoken in the middle of a battlefield, it had acted like a blessing straight from God. Jane hadn’t thought that its effects would last into the next day. She didn’t trust it to last unless she was truthful about their relationship. (Especially with Hal nodding enthusiastically to the question.)
“Close friends? Me, personally? No. She’s ten years younger than me. My entire family? Yes. My cousin is Team Tinker’s business manager. Tinker and Oilcan have slept at my aunt’s house more times than I could count. They’ve been over to my mom’s place a couple of times. Tinker taught my little brother how to use magic and helped him build his carpenter’s shop—which is just down the street from her scrapyard. The two are like extended family.”
Maynard nodded slowly. “That would be enough for the elves, what with their households being mostly unrelated members acting as a family. Certainly they bent over backward to include her cousin into their clique. The humans…sometimes I wonder at the stupidity of the political beast.”
Had all the politicians of Pittsburgh been raving at Maynard’s doorstep since the fighting began?
“The existence of the militia has ruffled some feathers?” Jane guessed.
“The treaty limits the number and type of weapons…” Maynard started to quote law.
“Director Maynard, have you ever read over the actual Elvish version of the treaty? One that didn’t come from Sparrow’s hand?”
Director Maynard’s eyes widened only slightly. He was probably good at poker. “Should I?”
“I would highly recommend it. The United Nations’ English version has very bad translations of some keywords, especially in terms of what the elves consider ‘natives.’ Once you know that the elves meant to include humans born on Elfhome to be recognized as ‘native’ it becomes glaringly obvious. They would have used the word ‘elves’ otherwise—wouldn’t they?”
He studied the boot toe that he ground against the pavement. “Sparrow was fluent in English, even more so than Windwolf at the time. She handled the translations of the paperwork. No humans knew Elvish yet. Since then, any human fluent in Elvish would have received an ‘original’ from Sparrow.” He looked up sharply. “Where did you get a copy of the Elvish version?”
“My uncle saved one of Raisin Sauce’s people from a saurus shortly after the first Shutdown.” Jane waved toward Chesty. “He was given four elfhounds as a reward for his courage. He and his family have remained close with the entire enclave since then. I asked my uncle to see if he could get a copy from Raisin Sauce.”
“But why did you even think to ask?”
“I guess Lieutenant Kukk didn’t detail the discussion at the stadium after the namazu hunt. Dark Harvest said that the EIA misunderstood the terms of the treaty. I had reasons to suspect Sparrow’s loyalty and that exchange got me wondering. It turns out that Windwolf personally gave each enclave an official copy. Raisin Sauce allowed us to take photos of his copy. Even before we started working with translators we knew we could trust, the differences were obvious. There are sections missing in the human versions. It seems that Sparrow left out pages that would have made the oni’s invasion more difficult.”
“Sparrow on one end, Chiyo on the other,” Maynard said.
Taji Chiyo had been Maynard’s administrative assistant who had handled much of the paperwork on the EIA end, screening everything that he saw. She had been an oni lesser blood—a kitsune with the ability to read people’s minds and create an illusion. Yumiko and the other yamabushi had been searching for the female since Tinker escaped from Lord Tomtom.
“I will have to get a new copy of the treaty from the Viceroy,” Maynard said.
Jane would offer to email him a copy but it would be best that he secure a copy that he trusted completely to be authentic.
“Why didn’t you let me know?” Maynard said.
“The work has been tedious and slow,” she admitted. “It seemed fairly straightforward at first, but then we discovered that there is a fundamental translation discrepancy. The university-trained translators had been given different meanings to words in comparison to what locals had been taught in high school. Our teacher at Brashear was an elf who learned English in the Easternlands from elves that traded with England back in the time of Shakespeare. His day-to-day English had a lot of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ thrown in. We thought at first that the differences in definitions were simply that English had changed in the last three hundred years. But then we discovered that Sparrow had been heavily involved in creating the Elvish coursework at Pitt. Even after we’re done, someone is going to have to redo all our work to verify that Sparrow had deliberately sabotaged the Elvish language courses at Pitt—which is what all the Earth-based diplomats and businessmen use.”
“God, what a nightmare,” Maynard muttered softly.
“At that point we realized that it might seem as if we were purposely mistranslating the treaty. Certainly I don’t see the university being quick to admit that everything it’s taught for the last twenty years is wrong. It would be simpler for them to point fingers and say that we have a political agenda.”
Maynard took out his phone and made notes on it. “For the time being, the less said about the militia, the better. I’ll need time to get a correctly translated treaty that the political community can’t deny.”
Hal was going to be disappointed but Jane planned to stay out of the limelight as much as possible. According to Yumiko, Kajo wasn’t among the known dead. The tengu were fairly sure that he was the one that cast the transformation spell that crippled the domana. They hadn’t found the casting circle that he used. Law Monroe had tracked all but one of the eleven nactka to the graveyard. Oilcan had recovered them there without encountering Kajo. The assumption was that Kajo had been overseeing the magical attack while expendable subordinates had led both the defense of the forest camps and the Oakland attack. From what the tengu could piece together, Oilcan and his sekasha had fought and killed two women who looked like Chloe Polanski. The tengu were guessing that these were Kajo’s Eyes.
The snake had been blinded but not killed. Until Kajo was dead, Boo could still be in danger.
“Since we can’t talk about the militia,” Jane said, “can we interview you on camera? You could answer a lot of ‘what was the EIA doing?’ questions for the viewers.”
Maynard allowed a wince go across his face to indicate that he wasn’t completely happy with the idea, but nodded anyhow.
“Hal?” Jane turned to her team, who were still eating their scrambled eggs.
Hal all but flung his plate at Nigel to hold and literally bounced up to Maynard. He got hyperactive when he was tired and they were all running with too little sleep. “Director Maynard!”
On second thought…
Jane caught hold of Hal and hauled him back from Maynard. “Hal,” she whispered, “I’m warning you: do not accidently blow up this man or set him on fire or shoot him.”
Hal got that slightly guilty look that always indicated one of the three had been a possibility. “Accidents just happen.”
He didn’t have a visible gun. They’d decided that for neutral viewers, him not being armed would play better. It was unlikely that he could set Maynard on fire, even accidently.
“Give me the grenade,” Jane said, holding out her hand.
Hal made an unhappy face. “How do you know I have a grenade?”
“I just do!” Jane curled her fingers into a fist warningly. “Give it to me!”
Hal surrendered the grenade and Jane gave him a push back toward Maynard.