Harbinger

19: SIGNED, SEALED, AND DELIVERED

Tinker vividly remembered the day that Tooloo stole her mail. It was in April. It was a few days before she turned eighteen and no longer had to be afraid of being deported as an underaged orphan. It was roughly eight weeks before she saved Windwolf’s life or met Pony. It was three months before she knew about the oni army hidden in and around the city.

Pittsburgh used to travel back and forth between Elfhome and Earth. While Pittsburgh was on Elfhome, all the mail on Earth addressed to the city was collected in a warehouse in Cranberry just on the other side of the Rim. The massive collection of letters and packages was shuffled across the border during Shutdown. Home delivery within Pittsburgh was suspended for forty-eight hours while the post office workers sorted through the monthly flood of mail. Two days after Startup, the mail carriers would stuff her mailbox with magazines, catalogs, junk mail, and a variety of small boxes that represented items impossible to find in Pittsburgh ordered over the internet during the last Shutdown. Thus she knew exactly what day it was when she caught Tooloo cleaning out her mailbox. April 25, six days before her eighteenth birthday.

It meant the birthday card would have been terrifyingly timely. How had the twins known what day she was born when she knew nothing about them?

The morning Tooloo had stolen her mail, Tinker had hiked down to her salvage yard, caught between annoyance and giggling madly. She had woken up insanely early from a weird and crazy dream. It started as a nightmare where she’d built a teleporting device that had gone haywire, spitting out duplicates of herself like something out of The Fly. Some of her copies were half-size. Some had black crow wings. Others were tiny as mice. She was hip-deep in weirdness before she’d gotten the machine turned off. In the dream she’d been frustrated that the copies had decided to throw a weird combination of birthday party and circus with everything from giant wingless birds to a large talking dog that spoke only in Japanese.

As if that wasn’t enough, the copies had decided to put up posters everywhere advertising that Tinker was still only seventeen and an orphan living alone. Shadowy men had taken notice and were coming with cages for the entire crazy mass. It was a stupid unsettling dream with bits of silliness that made her laugh all the while checking over her shoulder.

It had been a day designed to annoy her. April in Pittsburgh was normally a fragile, warm month as the city crept out of the hold of winter. The crab apple trees that hugged the river’s banks were all beginning to bloom, filling the air with their sweetness. This morning, though, had decided to turn bitter cold and damp. It wasn’t quite raining but dampness hung in the air like mist. To top it off, Tooloo had been at the mailbox of Pittsburgh Salvage, going through her mail.

“Tooloo!” Tinker shouted as she closed on the old half-elf.

The tall female was dressed in a threadbare fairy silk gown that came down to her ankles. The ragged hem showed off her worn red high-top sneakers. Her white hair was braided into a thick cord that hung down the middle of her back. Tooloo had her huge rooster, Box, hooked up to his little cart — that she was filling with Tinker’s mail.

“That’s mine!” Tinker tried to snatch a box out of the cart. Box pecked the back of her hand. “Ow! Tooloo! What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m keeping a certain little monkey from chasing its own tail.” Tooloo dropped a handful of packages and magazines into Box’s cart. “It only leads to trouble.”

“No! Stop that!” Tinker tried to grab a small Amazon box — probably the replacement motherboard she ordered — out of the wagon.

Box puffed up, readying himself for battle. He was a huge buff Orpington rooster, fifteen pounds of pure golden orange fury. She had seen him take on cats, dogs, foxes, and coyotes. He was a fearless and vicious warrior. He was, though, also fairly stupid — being a chicken and all.

Tinker had bought a loaf of raisin bread from the Jenny Lind bakery before Shutdown and then forgotten it. It was rock hard and possibly moldy (the raisins making it impossible to be sure). She’d brought it with her, thinking there was an off chance she would see Roach with his elfhounds. She pulled the loaf out, tore it into large chunks, and flung them onto the ground in front of Box. While the rooster was busy pecking at the bread, Tinker snatched up her packages.

“You can’t steal people’s mail!” Tinker said. “It’s against the law!”

“Pft! Moral obligations outweigh laws,” Tooloo said. “If you see a bomb in someone’s mailbox, you take it out.”

“Bomb? What bomb?” Tinker eyed the packages in her arms. She’d ordered a lot of odd things, some of which could be used for bomb making, but she hadn’t ordered anything explosive. At least, she was fairly sure she hadn’t. It had been a month or more since she ordered most of the items in the boxes.

“One can never be sure with off-world surprises. They arrive without warning to blow up in your face. That’s always been the problem.”

“There’s no bomb in my mail,” Tinker decided. “You just want some weird excuse to take it. If you need something, like packing material, just tell me.”

“You don’t explain a fire to a blind woman using colors. You just tell her that she’s going to get burned. The problem with monkeys is that they never listen. Give them to me.”

“Wait until I open them!” Tinker danced out of Tooloo’s reach. Thankfully the old elf didn’t follow. “I’ll bring them to you tonight.”

“Whatever.” Tooloo turned and walked away.

Box pecked up the last of the bread and strutted after Tooloo.

Tinker thought she had gotten everything off of Tooloo. Certainly everything she expected to find in her mail was there. She hadn’t been expecting a birthday card from her baby sisters, so she hadn’t realized that it was missing from her mailbox. Tooloo must have secreted it away while Tinker fought with Box. Tooloo had come armed to take everything but settled for the only “bomb” in Tinker’s mail.

Tinker stormed out of Lain’s house. She’d suffered a constant barrage of rough emotions since the tengu dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night. Fear of what the oni might do with the contents of Dufae’s box. Terror that she might have to act as parent to her twin sisters, who already outstripped her in insanely dangerous and impossible feats. Anger and jealousy toward Esme. Deep hurt that Lain hadn’t trusted her with the truth for so many years. After being tumbled through those many abrasive emotions all morning, Tinker had been polished down to pure rage.

Rainlily had caught up to them on Stormsong’s Delta, directed by Lemonseed as to where to find them. Tinker was too angry to ask how the female’s mission had gone. Pony and Stormsong had warned her that Windwolf wouldn’t be able to leave the battlefront. The fact that they were obviously right only fueled Tinker’s rage more. She caught flashes of blade talk as the sekasha filled one another in. She ignored it; Pony could tell her later about how useless Rainlily’s trip had been.

Tinker stomped to their big Rolls-Royce limo. Pony was the best driver of the five; he’d driven them to Lain’s. Tinker was too angry to be chauffeured; she got in behind the wheel. The sekasha gathered at her door, unhappy about her intended destination.

“If Tooloo is truly Vision,” Stormsong said quietly, “she will know that you are coming.”

“I don’t care.” Tinker held her hand out to Pony. The Rolls-Royce had been gifted to the elves near the turn of the century; it still used manual keys.

Stormsong pressed on even as Pony surrendered the keys. “If you think Lain and Esme are cruel and heartless for what they’ve done to you, know that they are just pale shadows of the ruthlessness that is Pure Radiance and Vision. I spent a hundred years begging my mother to tell me why she had me. Why a mixed caste? Why after thousands of years of being chaste, did she sleep with my father? Why him? Her answer had always been that if I could not envision the world that she was trying to create, then I was just a stumbling block for her to remove.”

Tinker paused in sliding the seat forward so she could reach the pedals. Pony might be the shortest and stockiest of the sekasha but he was still a foot taller than she. “Remove? Like kill you?”

It was telling that Stormsong had to consider the question for a moment. “I believe she would if she felt it was necessary. She is ruthless. She had a disagreement with Vision. She betrayed her own mother to the Skin Clan to make the world that we now live in. It was by her action that Vision was bound hand and foot in the first place.”

Tinker growled in frustration at the truth. Her grandfather could outthink her when she was a child with limited experience about how the world worked. He had a harder time as she got older. Lain and Tooloo, though, never had trouble keeping two steps ahead of her. “Well…your mother didn’t do a very good job if Vision got away.”

“Which should terrify you at the thought of going against Vision,” Stormsong said.

Tinker doubted that Tooloo would kill her. The female had been her babysitter; that had to count for something. Tinker wasn’t sure, though, that her Hand was safe from the old elf. Tinker frowned at the warriors who were patiently waiting for her to give orders. All five would willingly die to keep her safe. During the summer, she had come close to killing them several times over. They would go wherever she led; she had to be sure that she didn’t lead them into danger. Or at least…unnecessary danger.

Tinker had to assume that Tooloo was as clever and dangerous as Chloe. Tinker had trapped Chloe by doing abstruse things, like designing traps using both little known science and magic. Tinker didn’t want to kill Tooloo. Trapping her would be pointless. Tinker imagined that Tooloo would sit calmly in the trap, give her a slow clap, and then ask, “Now what, little monkey?”

Now what indeed?

Tinker handed the keys back to Pony and climbed over the center console to the back. She needed to think about this.

At one time, Tinker’s whole world had been the narrow five-mile-long island in the middle of the Ohio River. She and her grandfather had claimed most of Neville Island for themselves, living in huge empty hotel at the edge of the rusting hulks of industry. Pittsburgh’s steel-town legacy had started to crumble after the Second World War, but the deathblow had been the city being kidnapped to Elfhome. The only company on Neville Island that survived the first Startup had burned to the ground a few years later.

Downtown had been a place that the adults talked about. Tinker could see the tips of its skyscrapers over the trees that grew thick along the river’s edge. Since she and her grandfather never visited the city proper, Downtown seemed like a far-off fantasy castle. They left the island for only two exceptions: every few days, without rhyme or reason, her grandfather would take Tinker to Lain’s on Observatory Hill or across the river to Tooloo’s store in McKees Rocks.

At least, it seemed without logic to Tinker as a child. Lain felt like a random stranger that her grandfather didn’t particularly like but decided to entrust his granddaughter with. He referred to Lain as “that woman,” especially when Lain tried to influence how he was raising Tinker. The two fought over her education, diet, hygiene, and safety. More than once Lain had shown up at Neville Island during the spring floods to drag Tinker off to high ground as if it was her God-given right to kidnap small children out of their beds. Tinker thought that her grandfather only grudgingly permitted Lain’s attitude because Lain had been an astronaut, one of the few scientists on Observatory Hill who had actually been in space, and a force of nature when opposed.

It was all so clear now that her grandfather allowed it because Lain was her aunt.

But if Lain wasn’t an arbitrary stranger, then who was Tooloo?

Her grandfather didn’t trust strangers or elves, but he’d trusted Tooloo.

Oilcan had arrived on Elfhome knowing Elvish. He spoke High Elvish better than Tinker. He’d learned it from his mother, who had learned it from her great-aunt Josephina Dufae. Tinker never wondered how her great-great-aunt knew Elvish; she accepted it as one of the universal truths, like the Earth circling a different sun from the one she normally saw in the sky. Unbounded Brilliance, though, had died while his son was an infant. Etienne Dufae and his children might have had access to the Dufae Codex but that wouldn’t have taught them how to speak Elvish.

Had Tooloo been watching over the Dufae children for generations?

If she had been, it would explain so much. Why would Unbounded Brilliance break into his uncle’s private lockbox? How did infant Etienne get safely to Boston after Unbounded Brilliance had been swept up in the French Revolution? Why had her grandfather been living in Pittsburgh in the days prior to the city being kidnapped to Elfhome? How did Esme find out about Leonardo’s stored sperm and arrange for Tinker to be born?

Tooloo.

Vision.

Whoever she was.

The twins had warned the tengu about the Dufae box. It meant that the twins probably had an unedited copy of the Dufae Codex. Tooloo had given Esme a digital version of the journal to pass on to her children, most likely because she had foreseen that the twins would need magic to escape to Elfhome.

But Tooloo hadn’t given it to Tinker. She had let Tinker work with the highly edited version, fully knowing that Tinker was heading into a perfect storm of oni and elves.

How did Tinker get her to cough it up now?

Tinker sat in the back of the Rolls-Royce, blowing raspberries, as she came up with nothing.

The problem was that for Tinker’s entire life, Tooloo had defied all logic. The old elf almost never answered a direct question; when she did, she often refuted it within minutes. How old was she? Who were her parents? When was her birthday? Tooloo had given dozens of conflicting answers.

To be fair, some of the questions might have been impossible to answer. Vision had been created out of dragon DNA. Were Tooloo’s “parents” elves or dragons? Genetically she was both and neither. She’d been born a slave; her birthday probably hadn’t been celebrated with a frosted cake and lit candles. Even if Tooloo somehow knew the exact day, over the last few thousand years, humans had changed their calendar multiple times. September was no longer the seventh month. At one point, ten days were simply dropped from the calendar. Every four years, they added an extra day. How could anyone keep track?

The truth was, though, that Tooloo refused to be known. Even with something as simple as her favorite color, the female had answered with the entire spectrum of the rainbow, starting with red and ending with violet. Tinker used it to her advantage when she was little, discovering that a barrage of personal questions was the fastest way to trigger a magic lesson. Tinker knew that she was being derailed from learning anything about the old elf. Tooloo knew that Tinker knew. Had Tooloo ignored the personal questions simply to cut to what Tinker truly wanted in the first place?

Tinker had the unedited paper copy of the Dufae Codex. It would take days for her to plow through it alone. She could cut it up, give the pages to all the elves at Poppymeadows, and have them find every reference to the box. She really hated the idea of tearing apart the two-hundred-year-old family heirloom, especially knowing now that she and Oilcan only had a portion of it saved to computer memory.

She could look into how her grandfather managed to create the digital copy that he gave her; maybe one of his old computers had the unedited version on it. None of his machines, though, had been in the storage unit where she found the paper copy. Oilcan might have left the ancient computers at the now-leveled hotel. She couldn’t remember seeing them there either but she had been focused on getting her own machines up and running. She could call and ask Oilcan where the machines went, but that felt like a waste of time. Even if she could get the ancient machines to boot up, she would then have to hack past her grandfather’s security and dig through a mountain of purposely confusing file names. (She was never sure if her grandfather’s levels of encryptions were because of his paranoia of strangers or because of her curiosity.)

Maybe the tengu could finagle a copy from the twins. Actually, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would be faster and less painful than dealing with Tooloo.

Pony, she realized, was pulling into the parking space beside Tooloo’s seedy storefront.

Bread, Butter, Eggs, Fish, Fowl, Honey, Pittsburgh Internet Access, Milk, Spellcasting, Telephone, Translations, Video Rentals was written under the glass block windows in English and Elvish. Tinker had painted the words and runes there herself when she was eight. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that the advertising would pull in every spectrum of people within Pittsburgh. The locals wanting food and help with magic. The human newcomers who needed a public telephone and internet access. Elves who didn’t speak English. Was there ever a better information-gathering nest for a spider to sit in?

They sat in the car, its cooling engine ticking loudly in the silence.

Tinker stared at the Open sign in window of the store’s front door. Tooloo kept random hours as she worked both her store and her farm alone. She was religious about flipping the sign to Closed when she wasn’t in the building. It was swaying slightly. Even as Tinker watched, the sign came to a stop.

If Tooloo knew that Tinker was coming with five sekasha in tow, she wasn’t hiding. She had closed up her store to keep out other customers until Tinker arrived, and then flipped the sign as if to welcome her in. Maybe. Assuming that Tooloo was that good at seeing the future.

“Domi?” Pony spoke for all the sekasha who were all looking at her.

Was it worth getting out? Tinker had a ton of questions for Tooloo but would the female answer any of them? Was this a futile exercise? Or was the “Open” sign an indication that Tooloo was finally willing to talk?

Tinker wasn’t going to find out sitting in the car.

The bell above the door jangled as Pony went through ahead of Tinker.

Tooloo’s always seemed impossibly big on the inside. It wasn’t readily apparent from the outside but the female had built a hodgepodge of additions that also served to connect her store to nearby abandoned buildings. It had overhead lights but Tooloo rarely turned them on, preferring the sunlight that streamed through the glass block windows. Display shelves and clothing racks and antique furniture created an endless dim maze filled with junk that Tooloo had collected over decades, if not centuries.

Cloudwalker, Rainlily, and Little Egret spread out to search for hidden assassins, leaving Stormsong and Pony to guard over Tinker.

“Wood sprites,” Tooloo called from the big room in the back of the store that served as her living quarters. “They never have much common sense but they never lack for courage.”

Wood sprites! Tinker growled, pushing Pony aside to charge in the direction of the voice. Damn the old elf. The female had called her “wood sprite” all her life without explaining what it truly meant. Tooloo had known full well that Forge was still alive and grieving over his lost son, unaware that he had great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

Tinker paused at the threshold into the back room. The polished cherrywood planks glimmered with magic. She’d forgotten about the ley line running through Tooloo’s home. It had been invisible to her until she became a domana. She’d had nothing to compare it with when she had visited Tooloo just days after her transformation into an elf. Now that she had more experience with sensing magic, she realized that the old elf had camped on a fiutana. It wasn’t as powerful as the one at Reinhold’s, but it beat everything else that Tinker had seen in the last few months.

Tooloo was sitting in one of her two wing-backed chairs. Her big rooster, Box, stood in the other. Between them was a small chess table with pieces arrayed across the board. For all the world, it was like Tinker was interrupting an game. She knew, though, that Tooloo disliked chess with a passion and that none of the chickens were normally allowed in the house, not even Box. The female had staged the scene — but what was it supposed to mean? Tinker couldn’t guess. That dealing with Tinker was like playing chess with a chicken?

Box pecked at crumbs that had been sprinkled on the chess table to ensure his participation in the tableau.

Tinker clamped down on the questions that wanted to pour out of her. She might get only one real answer out of Tooloo, so it needed to be the right one. “Do you have—” No, no, Tooloo could claim to have the copy and then refuse to give it to her. “I need the digital copy of the Dufae Codex that you gave to Esme.”

“You have all you need,” Tooloo said. “I’ve made sure of that. You’re just wasting time, running around like a headless chicken. The hours are ticking down to minutes.”

“No, I don’t!” Tinker shouted, losing hold of the anger she’d been struggling to keep in. “Grandpa edited my copy. I didn’t know anything about the box or the nactka or the baby dragons or what the oni plan to do with them. I know that you know that I know that you know…” Tinker got lost in her sentence. “I haven’t known anything from the start and you’ve known that I haven’t all along.”

“You never listened when I warned you in the past.” Tooloo gave Box a little push toward the open door. “Shoo! I’m done with you for now.”

“Bok caw!” Box resisted to peck up two more crumbs and then turned his head sideways to eye the tabletop closely.

“You’re wasting time here,” Tooloo repeated, although it was difficult to tell if she was talking to Box or Tinker. Perhaps she was addressing them both. “I know you’re clever; you can figure this out without me showing you how the pieces are arrayed in this deadly game and reminding you how they move.”

She was definitely talking to Tinker.

Tinker chased the rooster off the chair and sat down. She eyed the chessboard warily. All the games she had ever played with Tooloo had ended in tears of frustration. Not because Tinker was bad at the game — she beat any other adult she ever played — but because Tooloo would “cheat” by having all the pieces — Tinker’s and her own — take on human personalities. Pawns would desert the game out of fear. Queens would fall in love with knights and run off with them. Bishops would assassinate their own kings. Chaos would reign.

Tooloo wasn’t some random crazy old elf but the most powerful oracle ever born to the elves. She had spent centuries carefully carrying out some kind of detailed plot. She had carefully set up this display. Why? What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all?

The board was turned so that Tinker seemed to be assigned black, and thus the second to move. The pieces weren’t all chessmen. At a casual glance, it would seem that Tooloo had just substituted random things for missing pieces. Tinker’s king was a miniature bottle of Heinz ketchup. A Superman mini-action-figure stood in for one of her bishops. Her rooks were miniature chicken figurines. All of Tinker’s pawns were Minnie and Mickey Mouse statues. Tooloo’s queen, one of her bishops, and four of her pawns were plastic monkeys in a variety of cute poses.

The pieces were arranged in the classic Queen’s Gambit, with white moving one of its monkey pawns to D4. Black mirrored the move, blocking any further advance. White continued the classic opening with a second monkey to C4, which black had captured. The arrangement of the pieces on the chessboard would seem like just random noise except Esme had called her half brothers “Flying Monkeys Four and Five.” Wouldn’t that make Chloe “Flying Monkey Six”? Who were all the other monkeys? Could the Heinz bottle be Pittsburgh itself? Were the Disney mice supposed to be her little sisters? And why all the chickens? Were all the changed pieces some kind of silent code that Tinker should already know?

“Bok caw!” Box complained, staring up at Tinker from the floor.

“I don’t understand,” Tinker said. “You may think you’ve told me everything but-but-but I don’t always listen!”

Tooloo laughed bitterly at the truth of the statement.

Tinker pressed on. “Why is it even up to me? You’ve had years and years. Centuries! Couldn’t you have stopped the Skin Clan before this?”

“You sound like my daughter,” Tooloo said. “Simple revenge, fast and bloody. It’s one thing to stop an object in motion. It’s quite another to change someone’s heart.”

“Whose heart are you trying to change?” Tinker asked.

Tooloo snorted. “You want a list? It’s quite long. You are on it. Things would be easier if you’d stayed hidden. But no, you plowed on through all the obstacles I put in your path. You gave yourself to my daughter and she made you into a baited trap. You have no idea how tiring it is to see something coming and no matter how hard you try, the ones you love best ignore your warnings. The only reason you escaped them that first time was because they didn’t know what they’d gotten hold of. They know now.”

“It would help if you actually explained things in a plain, straightforward way,” Tinker grumbled. “Something that didn’t involve chessboards and chickens and double-talk.”

“I have centuries of experience that say otherwise.” Tooloo waved away the complaint.

This was the Tooloo that Tinker expected to talk to.

Tinker looped back to her original attack plan. “I need the original digital copy of the Dufae Codex.”

Tooloo gave a tired laugh. “See? The world’s greatest oracle has told you that you don’t need it, but you persist instead of stopping and actually using that clever brain of yours.”

Tinker gritted her teeth against the urge to scream in frustration. “The Skin Clan has what Dufae — Unbounded Brilliance — stole from Iron Mace. They might use—”

“Oh, they will.” Tooloo closed her eyes. “Shortly. The clock is ticking. You’re wasting time.”

“Then give me the Codex!”

“I’ve seen what giving you the Codex now will do. You’ll waste time flipping pages and coming to conclusions already reached. Do you think that Unbounded Brilliance did nothing in France for all those years and years that he lived on Earth?”

“I think he found a solution!” Tinker shouted.

“Would he not have returned home if he had?” Tooloo asked calmly.

Tinker threw up her hands in frustration. “The gateways were closed behind him, cutting him off!”

“Would that stop you?” Tooloo asked. “Would you stay in place if you knew the answer to save your world?”

“No,” Tinker huffed, because the truth was a gut-punch. She eyed the chessboard. “How much time?”

Tooloo spread her hands. “You are not playing against me. There are others in the game. It could be as soon as an hour or as late as tomorrow. The less said, the better.”

Other intanyai seyosa who could see the future. Tinker eyed the chessboard. Stormsong had said that one of the twins shared her nuenae. Lain had said that Chloe was probably the result of the same type of mass fertilization of eggs that created the twins. How many sisters did Chloe have?

Tinker eyed the white pieces on the chessboard. Was Tooloo saying, in so many words, that at this moment the “monkeys” could be spying on this conversation? Tinker pulled out her tablet and took a picture of the board. If the substituted pieces were some kind of code, it was going to take a while for her to figure out. If she had time…

If she was going to fight her shadow again, she’d better start by hiding where she couldn’t be found until she had a game plan. Someplace where she had access to all sorts of things she could turn into unexpected weapons.