Harbinger

13: TEAM MISCHIEF! GO!

Louise yipped in surprise and fear when something ran up her bare leg. In theory she loved all things small and furry, but not when they were running loose inside her shorts. She jumped up from the concrete floor.

Jillian yelped in unison. “What is it?”

“There’s something alive in here.” Louise had been sitting cross-legged, wiring together the luggage mules through their maintenance ports. Whatever the small furry thing had been, it had fallen out of her lap and disappeared among the clutter scattered thick around her.

“Alive?” Jillian pulled out her Taser. “Like what? A steel spinner? A strangle vine?”

“I don’t know!” Louise stepped up onto the luggage mule’s platform to get herself off the floor.

Crow Boy had gone to find food and information. He believed that the bunker was safe, hidden as it was in the middle of the secret tengu village. He was thinking “oni invaders” not “deadly vermin.”

Louise looked around for a weapon.

“It’s me!” Nikola’s voice called from inside a boot lying sideways on the floor. A white robotic mouse peeked out cautiously to wave at Louise. It wore Nikola’s blue scarf. “Silly old bear. We were bored so we came to see what you are doing.”

“Nikola!” Jillian squealed with happiness. She tucked away her Taser so she could scoop up the robotic mouse and nuzzle it. “I’ve missed you and the girls so much!”

Louise felt a flash of surprise and dismay. Didn’t Jillian realize that the last thing they needed was bored babies?

On the heels of that impatient thought, she also realized that Jillian had spent most of the summer worried that she’d lose first the babies and then Louise. While Jillian had Louise walking and talking and plotting beside her, the babies had been dormant for a month. Jillian didn’t have Louise’s “sense” that the babies were safe and sound within their seven-pound eggs. The twins had marked the sky blue shells with the name of the baby they held but Louise supposed that wasn’t the same as hearing Nikola’s familiar Christopher Robin/little English boy voice.

“Are the girls here too?” Louise said.

“Of course we are!” Chuck answered as she parkoured across piles of camping gear. Her mouse had lost its pink scarf. Its right ear was torn and its face had dirt streaked across it like war paint.

“Chuck!” Jillian scooped up the battered robot to add to her mouse nuzzling. “You look so fierce!”

“Being in an egg is boring!” Red Jawbreaker stood on Louise’s tablet three mules down. The Jawbreakers sounded nearly identical but Red wore a red gingham scarf. “There’s nothing to do. Nothing to listen to. I want music! Let’s drop the beat!”

Red must have opened up Louise’s music folder as the deep thumping base of Imagine Dragons’ “Believer” started to play. Red sang along with the words. “First things first, I’mma say all the words inside my head! I’m fired up and tired of the way that things have been, oh-oohh!”

“We want to race!” Green Jawbreaker scrambled up the next luggage mule down. Her scarf of green velvet was starting to fray at the ends. “We found our mice but we can’t find our mini-bikes. We want to use the luggage mules instead!”

“No, no, no, no!” Louise cried. “Don’t touch the mules! Why can’t it ever be simple?”

When Crow Boy said that he would recharge things, Louise had assumed he would stop at useful things like the luggage mules and their computers. Apparently he’d also charged up the babies’ robotic mice. How did he miss the babies’ other toys?

Louise carefully picked her way toward the pile of items that were related to magic. After they had sorted everything and come up with a plan, they pulled most of the piles apart, resulting in the floor being covered with everything that might be useful now. Anything unneeded had stayed stacked together, mostly in cardboard boxes labeled with their contents. Back when they had geared up on Earth, they had tried to stay as organized as possible. “I’ll find your…your what? Mini-bikes?”

“Chuck means the mini-hovercarts,” Nikola said.

Did they even bring those? When did the babies start calling them mini-bikes? Back at the Waldorf Astoria, they called them mini-hovercarts because the small square platforms sort of looked like little shopping carts that hovered. The plastic railing kept the robotic mice bodies from falling off. The boxy design controlled by Wi-Fi interface had been easier to build than something that looked and operated like a motorcycle.

The babies had been on tiny hoverbikes in her dream. They’d been wearing racing goggles — something requested but the twins hadn’t had time to create. In the dream, Chuck Norris had her pink scarf, there had been no war-paint-like dirt on her mouse, and its ears had been intact.

Oilcan “saw” the mice but not in a completely literal manner.

“How did you talk to Oilcan?” His real name was Orville but after seeing the world through his eyes, Louise couldn’t bring herself to use it anymore.

“I told you that Lou would see us,” Nikola said to his sisters.

“Dream walking is easy-peasy.” Chuck Norris was unrepentant as always. “It was only a little harder talking to someone who is awake than someone who is asleep. Joy came with us.”

“That explains the candy,” Louise muttered to herself. Joy had been there, literally, while the babies had only projected themselves — somehow. The question became: How did Joy carry said candy back to Haven so quickly? Louise had a hazy notion that Pittsburgh proper was somewhere miles to the southeast, but she wasn’t sure how far. She knew that Joy could phase through any solid wall, but could she teleport too?

“What are you talking about?” Jillian said.

“I told you that the girls didn’t like the names that we picked out for them,” Louise said. “They went to talk to Oilcan to champion their cause.”

“They did what?” Jillian cried. “And how did you ‘see’ them?”

“It’s another weird genetic trick that some of us got from being from two dragon bloodlines,” Louise said. “You can see magic. We both can cast domana spells. I can dream walk.”

“And so can we!” Chuck said. “Charlene is a stupid name! I want to be Chuck Norris Dufae!”

“And I want to race!” Green’s voice this time came from the luggage mule that her mouse had been sitting on. The mule unlocked its wheels.

“No!” the twins both shouted, pointing firmly at the mule just like their mother would have.

“If you try to move that, you’ll rip out the cables and damage both mules’ maintenance ports!” Louise said. “And then everyone will die! Just give me a minute! I’ll find your mini-bikes. Just don’t mess with the mules!”

“Everyone will die?” Nikola echoed.

“What is all this?” Chuck scrambled up onto the mule to examine the wiring. “What are you doing?”

“Can we help?” Nikola said.

“Of course we can help!” Chuck said. “Team Mischief! Go!”

Their trying to help would be almost as bad as their trying to race the mules.

“I don’t think you’ll understand what we’re doing,” Louise said truthfully.

Jillian, though, launched into an explanation. “We’re using the neural engines of the luggage mules to build generative adversarial networks. If you look at the data that Dufae has in the Codex, he seemed to be trying to track subatomic particles. It appears that the elves don’t have anything like Feynman diagrams or even calculators beyond a simple abacus, so Dufae was stuck crunching numbers the hard way.”

“We can grind through his data fast with the mules, but only if you don’t damage them,” Louise said.

She hadn’t seen the babies’ toys when they sorted through everything but Jillian had dealt with most of the items that used magic to function. They had come to Elfhome loaded for bear, expecting to fight their way through the wilderness. While they had things like the Tasers, the twins’ size, age, and the short time that they had to prepare meant that their most powerful weapon was their ability to combine magic and science. Using money that they had stolen from Desmarais, they had bought a hundred times what they could possibly use or carry on them, hence the fleet of luggage mules. The number of mules that they brought with them had been limited only by how many they could get drop-shipped to their Monroeville hotel.

“Can’t you use your tablets?” Green Jawbreaker, thankfully, was back in her mouse again. “Don’t they have neural engines? What about your phones?”

“Yes,” Jillian said with more patience than Louise could have had. “They both have neural engines, but they’re primitive compared to the luggage mules.”

Louise started to shift the cardboard boxes of magical supplies. “Think of what the mules have to do: follow their owner through crowds, avoiding people while balancing any load across any terrain, be it indoor or outdoor, and in any weather condition. Wet grass. Deep snow. Icy stairs. Beach sand.”

“What’s a generative adversarial network?” Nikola said.

“It’s when you set up two neural networks that ‘play against each other’ in a task.” Jillian put down the mice and joined the search. “The concept evolved from game theory. The networks are competing but they’re also learning from each other. We’re pairing up the mules, two each as a team, and then feeding them the data sets that Dufae recorded within the Codex from his experiments with shield magic. Each team is trying to find the best possible spell.”

“It’s basically what Dufae was charting out with pen and paper in the Codex,” Louise said.

“But the mules can work a zillion times faster than any normal person,” Jillian said.

Louise found a box marked “Baby Toys.” She opened it up to find everything related to the hovercarts piled on top of the broken robotic dog.

The flash of a muzzle in the darkness. The flare of pain. Tesla’s deep angry growl.

“Oh.” She whimpered at the memory.

“What is it?” Nikola tried to climb up the smooth side of the cardboard box and failed.

Louise blinked away the sudden tears. She didn’t have time to break down and cry. She steeled herself to lift out the carts. “I found your mini-bikes. They need to be recharged before you can race.”

Chuck parkoured across the luggage mules to land on the edge of the box. “Oh, it’s Tesla. We should fix it.”

“Yeah!” Nikola said. “It was useful to have a big body now and then.”

“The mice are more fun!” Green Jawbreaker called. “Tesla was so crowded when we were all in it.”

Her brother and sisters were not the bodies that she’d grown used to seeing them in, Louise reminded herself. They were four large eggs far above her head — from which God knew what would hatch out. Tesla was a broken machine; he was not Nikola.

“We don’t have time to fix Tesla,” Louise said. “We’re working on a big, big problem. Besides, we don’t have any spare parts for him.”

“Can’t we just print them?” Chuck said.

Louise glanced to Jillian, who shook her head. “Our printers aren’t sophisticated enough. We would need something heavy duty like the ones at Perlman. We could barely do the prototype of the mice on ours. We don’t have time to look for one.”

“I wonder if we can find a printer in Pittsburgh that can do it,” Green continued as if she hadn’t heard Louise. It was hard to tell. She could be just ignoring Louise; the babies were good at ignoring things that they didn’t like or understand.

“I’ll look!” Red Jawbreaker cried. “Me! Me! I can do it!”

“Be careful!” Louise said instead of “No, don’t” because the babies were bored and frustrated and probably scared. Looking for big 3D printers that they could “borrow” was probably safer than doing something like trying to track down oni and evil elves.

“We’ll be like ghosts!” the girls cried. Their robot mice bodies fell silent and still.

“I’ll stay with you.” Nikola climbed up onto her shoulder.

“How are you even controlling the mice?” Louise asked. “When you were in Tesla, it made sense — kind of — because he had a Wi-Fi connection that you could use to link with the robotic mice bodies.”

“I’m not sure.” Nikola cocked his head. “That’s a good question. We were bored. We could hear you talking about our names and the others were really annoyed with you. After you went to sleep, we decided to go talk to Orville. When we came back to Haven, someone had set up an internet connection. Over the last few hours, people have been sending hundreds of emails, coming and going. We skimmed the emails but they were boring. People we didn’t know going off to places we can’t get to. I’ll connect your tablet.”

The tengu were terrified at what the nactka could mean to their future. Jin Wong must have reversed his decision to keep Haven on a blackout in hopes that the improved communication would help in the war effort.

Louise hooked up the mini-hovercarts so that they would recharge and went back to her tablet. Nikola had logged her into a local network named Oneiroi. Being that the Oneiroi were the Greek personification of dreams, it might be a network that the tengu set up for Gracie. Louise resisted the urge to check on all of her favorite Pittsburgh sites that had been available to the twins only during Shutdown. She did stop the Imagine Dragons songlist that Red Jawbreaker had left playing and found the streaming signal from her favorite underground fusion radio station, WESA. “Sky Diving” was finishing up.

“Nicadae Pitsubaug!” the deejay shouted in pidgin Elvish and then switched over to English. “This is WESA and I’m Marti Wulfow, bringing you the best of new elf fusion music. A big shout-out to our sponsor, the Wool Shed, for all your knitting needs. The Wool Shed is a co-op of shepherds both here in Pittsburgh and in the Easternlands. It features indi, merino, and mohair wool. They have dyed yarn skeins and bulk carded wool. I’ve started my wool socks — it’s going to be a cold one this winter! And it’s… I want to say a beautiful day here in Pittsburgh but I can see storm clouds rolling in. We could be in for all sorts of nasty weather out there, so take precautions: take your umbrellas if you’re going out just in case! This is Naekanain with their new hit single, ‘We Are Pittsburgh’!”

A song she’d never heard before started playing. Naekanain’s lead singer was Carl Moser, who had a rough growling voice. “Blood on the pavement, blood on the blade, blood flows through common veins.”

It was odd knowing that musicians she’d spent a third of her life idolizing were suddenly a few miles south instead of in another universe, some impossible distance away. That she was going to meet the very people she used to make videos of using Barbie doll stand-ins. Windwolf. Wraith Arrow. Stormsong. Stormhorse. Maybe even Queen Soulful Ember. It made her feel a little giddy, mixed with something that could have been fear. All the kids at Perlman knowing about the Lemon-Lime videos had been a surprising revelation with weird, unexpected side effects. Surely the elves had never seen the videos. Hopefully. She wasn’t sure if Queen Soulful Ember had a forgiving side. The queen they portrayed in their videos didn’t. What if Louise’s “future-seeing” ability had picked that up? What a terrifying thought. She pushed the thought from her mind and focused on the problem at hand.

Red Jawbreaker was the first to report back, but she hadn’t found a printer. She hadn’t even looked for a printer. Instead she had gone to raid the underground elf fusion rock radio station for information. “It’s totally old school! They have an actual radio tower and everything. Marti Wulfow is awesome. She’s part of the Resistance! That whole bit about the storm and the umbrella? That was code! She has a long list of words you don’t say often that mean other things. Listen! Listen!”

“This is WESA and I’m Marti Wulfow, bringing you the best of new elf fusion music. It’s the top of the hour weather report! We’re looking at a huge storm blowing in, people! I hope you have your umbrellas with you. It’s going to be raining cats and dogs, cows and zebras! And now here is ‘First Hand,’ written by our very own Orphan for our very own Tinker domi!”

“Did you hear?” Red cried with triumph. “‘Umbrella’ means combat weapons. ‘Zebras’ means all primary scouts should report to their cell leaders.”

“What?” Louise shouted as Marti Wulfow started to play yet another Naekanain song that she hadn’t heard before.

Red continued as if she hadn’t heard the question. “If you meet someone and want to know if they’re in the Resistance, you say, ‘We are Pittsburgh’ and they say, ‘We are Team Tinker.’ Isn’t that cool? Oh, oh, oh and get this! Oilcan is Orphan. He wrote the song Marti is playing now and ‘Sky Diving’ and a lot of other songs that we like!”

“Really?” Nikola locked onto the least important part of Red’s report.

“It’s a secret but Marti is friends with both Oilcan and Carl Moser. I found an email where Marti was asking Carl if becoming an elf was going to stop Oilcan from writing songs as Orphan and Carl didn’t think so because Tinker is still the same girl that he’s always known.”

“Wait, wait, wait — Orville is an elf now?” Jillian cried.

“Please, try to keep up,” Red said.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you about that,” Louise said. “Dufae’s father, Forge, is here in Pittsburgh and he made Oilcan an elf. It seems very messy, like Oilcan didn’t ask to be an elf or something. I don’t know the whole story but…we might have to live with Forge and it doesn’t make Tinker happy.”

“And?” Jillian shouted.

“And what?” Louise asked, confused. “I really didn’t get the entire story. It was like walking into the middle of a very weird soap opera. Something horrible happened to these elf kids from the Stone Clan and Oilcan is their dad now or something…”

Jillian was staring at her with hurt and anger.

“I can’t help it that our family is weird!” Louise shouted. “All of us! Just look at us!”

“Leave me out of this conversation,” Red Jawbreaker said. “I’m not weird. I’m going to see what else I can find.”

Red’s mouse went silent.

Louise threw up her hands. “I really don’t understand everything that happened in Pittsburgh since the last Shutdown. The last news reports that we had were from July’s Shutdown and that was just that Windwolf survived the attack on him.”

Jillian visibly struggled to keep her temper. “And he married our sister — after turning her into an elf.”

“Exactly!” Louise said. “Our sister is now a full elf! Esme is back from Alpha Centauri — and she’s the same age as when she left eighteen years ago. That doesn’t make any sense! Dufae’s father is still alive after hundreds of years — and he’s here in Pittsburgh, wanting to be grandpa to anyone descended from his son. And Oilcan is dad to a bunch of elf kids in some way that I totally don’t understand. So much weirdness happened in a few months. We really need to be brought up to speed. Fast.”

Jillian narrowed her eyes and studied Louise for a minute. “They’re going to make us choose between them — aren’t they?”

“Yes.” Louise felt better for getting it out in the open.

Jillian threw up her hands. “How are we supposed to pick? We don’t know them. None of them. Not really. How soon?”

“I don’t know. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t understand. Something about us being Stone Clan, not Wind Clan, and some scary people called Harbingers. What Tinker and Oilcan are most afraid of is that the Stone Clan might try to use us as pawns.”

Jillian gave a short evil laugh. “Oh, they can try all they want but we’re not going to be pawns.”

“I don’t think it’s what we should be focusing on,” Louise said. “Based on the rest of this summer, just about anything can happen the next week or so. We need to figure out Dufae’s shield.”

Green Jawbreaker’s and Chuck’s mice both suddenly stirred to life.

“I found a printer for Tesla!” Chuck reported. “It’s plenty big enough and it’s just sitting idle. No one has used it for a couple of weeks, probably since the gate fell.”

“I found Tinker’s secret base!” Green squeaked with excitement.

“Really?” Nikola asked.

“Where?” Chuck cried.

“I’ll show you!” Green said. “Follow me!”

“Wait!” Louise cried. “You can’t go breaking in on her private stuff.”

“We’re not breaking in,” Green said with labored patience. “Someone put this massive backdoor into her system. Her security is wide open. Since the door is hanging open, we should be able to go in and look around — right? She’s got very nice computer systems with a very helpful AI. She named it Sparks. I had lots of fun playing with him. You should see some of the things she’s invented. Talk about mad-scientist genius! She’s got detailed schematics and print files and everything — though Sparks says there’s no devices attached…”

“Show us! Show us!” Chuck and Nikola squeaked.

“Who hacked her system?” Louise cried before all four could virtually run off.

“I don’t know,” Green said as if it was little importance. She cocked her head as if listening to some distant voice. “Sparks says it was someone using an IP registered to a company called Midas Exploration, L.L.C. Is that like LOL? It has lots of employees. Any one of them could have hacked her system.”

Chuck was frantically waving her paws in impatience. “Show me Tinker’s secret base! I want to see.”

“Come on!” Green said even as Louise and Jillian both cried out, “No!” The mice both went still again as the babies went off to explore Tinker’s computer systems.

“We really need to find a way to put them into time out without mentally traumatizing them,” Jillian said.

Crow Boy returned with a small flock of winged tengu children and a basket full of food. The three older kids were dressed as warriors even though they were probably only seventh or eighth graders. They wore sharp metal claws on their crow feet, and war paint. They were obviously trying to look fierce despite their age. Louise would have thought it a joke except she had seen Crow Boy fight for his life. The two boys in normal street clothes were younger, one about the twins’ age and the other looked like a kindergartener — if kindergarteners had large black crow wings.

“Why did you bring them?” Louise whispered to Crow Boy as he unloaded several pork cutlet bento boxes out of the basket. The twins didn’t deal well with normal kids; they’d been social outcasts at school. Things had improved during the class play but that was more because of the other kids changing their attitudes after they found out that the twins were Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. The twins had their hands full just dealing with the babies. They didn’t need more chaos. At least the tengu kids were not bouncing off the walls or picking through the clutter on the floor. They stood in a line and stared at the twins with dark brown eyes.

For some reason, Louise could only think of barn owls, but those were the mortal enemies of crows. It was interesting to note that the tengu wings scaled to the child’s size as the spell that triggered the magical constructs seemed identical on all the children.

“They have been on Elfhome all summer,” Crow Boy whispered in reply. “I could ask them about what they know and report to you what they said, but I might not ask them the right questions.”

“Fair enough,” Jillian said, although she didn’t look any happier than Louise felt.

It had been a whispered conversation and the tengu children’s faces didn’t change but Louise had a feeling that they had heard every word. It meant that the twins had to be careful not to leak out their secrets while trying to learn all they could from the children.

“Do they know anything useful?” Louise realized how rude that sounded. “I mean, what we need to know is complicated magic stuff and what our family is like.”

One of the teenage girls snorted. “She’s right. Even Riki couldn’t keep up with Tinker domi. I should be out fighting with the other warriors, not babysitting.”

“Suit yourself.” Jillian made shooing motions. “We don’t need babysitters.”

The girl made a face and glanced meaningfully at the kindergartener. She hadn’t meant the twins when she complained about babysitting duty.

“The Chosen are leaders, Keiko, before they are warriors,” Crow Boy said. “Else they could never lead us to peace.”

Keiko took a deep breath and growled it out. “Yes, I know. Not all the Nestlings have their wings and they’ll need practice flying. Until everyone can flee Haven safely under their own power, someone of the Chosen bloodline needs to stay to coordinate an evacuation.”

The other girl looked a little surprised that Keiko had backed down so easily. “Only you could have gotten away with saying that to her face, Daffodil.”

Crow Boy frowned at the girl for using his hated nickname. “We should mind our manners.” He gave a slight bowing wave toward the twins. “These are the Chosen of Joy, daughters of Jin Wong’s savior, Esme Shanske, and sisters to our domi: the honorable Jillian and Louise Mayer.”

He turned to bow and wave toward the teenage girl, the boy who seemed to be the twins’ age, and the kindergartener. “These are the Chosen of Providence, nieces and nephews of our leader, Jin Wong: the honorable Keiko, Mickey, and Joey Shoji.”

Crow Boy had told the twins that he lived next door to the Shoji family, pretending to be a mild-mannered American suburbanite while secretly protecting the Chosen bloodline. He’d gotten Keiko and Mickey to safety after the house had been attacked, but Joey had been kidnapped by the oni. At some point, while Crow Boy was on Earth with the twins, Joey been found and rescued. It gave new meaning to “babysitting” duty and the face paint: If Haven was attacked, the older children would fight to death to protect the younger ones.

Keiko bowed. “Honored to meet you.”

Mickey waved nervously and said, “Heyo!”

Joey whispered, “They look just like her — only shorter.”

“Hush,” Keiko whispered even as Mickey nodded in agreement.

If they had met Tinker, then they might be able to answer the twins’ questions about her.

“This is Hoshi and Mai Sessai.” Crow Boy gave another polite bow and wave toward the other two kids. Hoshi was a teenage boy with feathers braided into his long hair; he was slightly taller than Crow Boy so he might have been older. Mai was a girl whose black hair been cropped into a pixie cut. They both nodded in greeting.

“They are yamabushi, like I am,” Crow Boy said. “They were raised here on Elfhome. There is little that they do not know of Pittsburgh or the surrounding wilderness or the oni forces that we face.”

“Okay,” Jillian drew the word out to emphasize the twins’ confusion. “We do need to know about our family—”

“Eventually,” Louise finished the thought. “What we really need to stay focused on is the shield.”

Crow Boy nodded. “As the Chosen, the Shoji family has been taught the language of the Ryu dragons. They might be able to talk to Joy.”

“Do we really want to talk to Joy?” Jillian said what Louise was thinking. “She’s just a baby.”

Which was the nice way of saying that Joy was hopelessly self-centered, often rude, and generally not helpful.

“She might be, or she not be,” Keiko said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Louise said.

“While we have been under Providence’s protection for thousands of years, there is much we do not know about the dragons of Ryu,” Keiko said. “At one point in time, we had all that Providence’s child could tell us about her father’s people written down, but it was decided to burn all our records when we were enslaved, lest they fall into the hands of our captors. What remains is an oral history, passed from parent to child.”

“It’s full of holes,” Mickey complained. “Like who was Providence’s mate? Why wasn’t she looking for their missing kid? Did they have any other kids? How many babies do dragons have at a time? Are they born live like boa constrictors or hatched from eggs like alligators?”

“Mickey, I’m trying to condense.” Keiko motioned that he should stay quiet. “But yes, there are holes in what we know. Since the appearance of Impatience, we’ve been looking closer at our legends and realizing how little we know. What we know for sure was that Providence’s child originally was a dragon by the name of Nirvana. Our legends imply that she was young, and thus not held accountable for breaking some of the rules of draconic society, namely the edict covering travel to Elfhome. We believe that she was trying to rescue other dragons that had gone missing. Providence asked Wong Jin to rescue his daughter from the elves. We know that Wong Jin was too late to save the dragon, but found shattered pieces of Nirvana, including a young female who was ‘made from what had been stolen from Nirvana,’ who took the name of Huan, which means ‘happiness.’”

“Nirvana. Happiness.” Mickey made a rolling motion. “Joy?”

“We named Joy—” Louise said.

“You named Joy.” Jillian corrected her. Unsaid was that Louise came up with the name while the magic generator was running. “I wanted to call her Greedy Gut or Bottomless Pitt. She turned down all the other names we came up with. We tried dozens of them.”

“I think Joy understands more English than what she actually uses to communicate,” Crow Boy said. “It’s possible that since the dragons can project their minds outside their bodies that they actually have some type of telepathy.”

Like the babies “talking” to Oilcan, Louise thought.

“Our legends imply that Wong Jin found all the pieces of Nirvana,” Keiko said. “But our legends could be wrong.”

“I see what you’re implying,” Louise said carefully. It did seem plausible that Joy was a missing fragment of Nirvana. Did the tengu think this gave them some claim to Joy? “But I’m not sure what point you’re trying to get to.”

“Dragons have a complex and powerful set of written spells that they can use to supplement their natural abilities. Impatience taught some to Tinker domi and he inscribed others on Esme’s ship to keep it stable against the forces of wind and gravity. If Joy has Nirvana’s memories, then she should know a great deal about magic.”

“Wow! Okay, that makes sense.” Louise looked around the cluttered bunker. The baby dragon was nowhere to be seen. “Joy used to be anchored to us via the magic generators. Since we got to Elfhome, she comes and goes as she pleases. I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“I brought cookies,” Crow Boy said loudly.

“Cookies!” Joy squealed, suddenly on Louise’s shoulder.

Yes, Joy could teleport. The question remained how far could she teleport? And could she teach it to the babies once they were born? Oh God, if the babies could teleport themselves out of cribs, the future was going to be nightmarish.

The tengu children had surprising reactions.

The two yamabushi stepped forward, spreading their wings to shield Keiko, Mickey, and Joey. Keiko sputtered from the sudden face full of feathers.

Mickey cried “Whoa! Cool!”

Joey ducked under the yamabushi’s wings to bow and call out a flowing greeting in a strange language.

“Be nice.” Louise sensed that Joy was about to be Joy. “Or no cookies.”

“Tengu belong to Providence,” Joy grumbled. “Double stupid poopy face.”

Louise remembered it was the same thing Joy had said when they first met Crow Boy. The little dragon had instantly recognized the winged boy as someone who belonged to Providence. If Joy was a leftover fragment of Nirvana, though, she couldn’t have known about Providence becoming the guardian spirit of the tengu. That had happened after Nirvana had been “shattered” by the elves. “How do you know?”

Joy blew a raspberry. “Says so.”

“Says so?” Louise echoed in confusion.

Joy reared up, holding onto Louise’s ear to stabilize herself. Her mane bristled out, each tendril writhing, seeming more like a nest of snakes than hair. Louise felt something warm wash over her, like someone had opened a door to a desert. The dry heat lifted the hairs on her arm but didn’t shift any of the lightweight clutter strewn about her feet. A glowing line appeared on the left hands of all the tengu, running up their arms to disappear under their shirts. The children gasped and peered closely at the line.

“It’s tiny little letters,” Joey said.

“Dragon runes,” Mickey gasped. “It’s cool! It’s like an ultrasecret magical tattoo.”

The older kids glanced at one another, obviously uneasy by the discovery.

“This part is Providence’s name.” Keiko traced out part of the gleaming line of runes. “I can’t read the rest. I’m not sure how I feel about this.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of like finding out you’re a Build-A-Bear.” Mai tented her shirt to see where the writing led even as it faded away.

Hoshi shook his head. “We’ve always known that Providence interceded. He did what he could to protect us.”

The realization that Providence hadn’t been able to wholly protect the tengu filled Louise with disquiet. It meant that the dragons didn’t know a spell that could shield Pittsburgh from whatever the oni planned.