Wolf Who Rules

Chapter 20: Follow The Yellow Brick Road

Stone Clan chose to wait until the next morning to protest Wind Clan’s actions. Wolf wasn’t sure why they had delayed, so he stood and listened to Earth Son rant on about protocol and etiquette.

“Wind Clan is insulting us at every step. Look,” Earth Son pointed up the tall iron wood scaffolding to where Tinker stood, overseeing the installation of her scrap yard crane. Little Horse was up in the scaffolding with her, but the rest of her Hand were keeping to the ground. “Wind Clan’s domi hasn’t come down to hear our complaints.”

Wolf made a show of glancing around. “We did not know this was to be a formal aumani. I see the rock, but where is the incense and the flame?”

Wolf surprised True Flame into a smile, but the prince caught himself and gave him a hard look.

“Do we need to call an aumani?” True Flame’s look warned him not to make light of it.

Wolf spread his hands to show that he didn’t know. “Jewel Tears came to me and stated that the Stone Clan could not solve this problem before—”

“It was not her place to make that decision!” Earth Son snapped. “I will say when the Stone Clan can or can not do something.”

Wolf glanced at Jewel Tears but she had her court mask on, letting none of her emotions show. There was no way to judge if this was an honest miscommunication within the Stone Clan, or a contrived situation. If it was the later, then politically it had been a mistake to act.

Wolf would have to salvage the situation by forcing True Flame to disregard political protocol for the sake of military imperative. “If the information she gave us was accurate, then what is important is that the oni are prevented from using the Ghostlands —”

“Are you saying that I’m lying?” Earth Son seemed eager for Wolf to slander him.

Wolf considered Earth Son for a minute. Was he that blind to the dangers that they were facing? “I’m saying that there are tens of thousands of oni and an oni dragon on the other side of the Ghostlands, and it would be good to keep them there.”

Earth Son waved that concern aside. “Your untrained domi and her Hand survived the first dragon.”

“Do not mistake that creature for a true oni dragon.” True Flame had studied Impatience at Tinker’s workshop. The prince pointed out that not only was the ‘dragon’ much smaller than the creatures he fought; it also had one more digit per foot.

Tinker theorized that since the spell painted onto Impatience’s scales had been washed or rubbed away, the dragon might be free from the oni’s control. Regardless, they still didn’t know how to cage or effectively fight the beast. All options weighed, it was decided to leave the creature in Oilcan’s care as an ally instead of treating it as a foe. According to the tengu, however, and confirmed by some mysterious means by the NSA agents, there was a second, larger dragon by the name of Malice still on Onihida. Plans to update the Stone Clan on the dragons, however, had been waylaid by Earth Son’s attack on Tinker’s operation.

Wolf pushed the conversation back to the military implications. “Jewel Tears stated that if the Ghostlands expand to the river, there will be a shift in forces that will allow the oni to push their army through.”

Jewel Tears’ mask slipped and she gave him a look of pure hatred.

Earth Son scoffed. “They’ll be pinned between the river and the Ghostlands. With five domana, seventy sekasha, the dreadnaught and the royal troops, we can easily deal with the oni as they emerge…”

True Flame lost his patience. “If the oni send a dragon across first, we will be too engaged with it to block the oni. We will do whatever it takes to close the Ghostlands before anything more can come through.”

Earth Son recognized that he was threading on an edge with the prince and retreated with, “I am not saying we ignore the Ghostlands. I am saying that this is a Stone Clan specialty…”

“Are you being hampered by the Wind Clan domi?” True Flame snapped. “She will not be using magic, since, as you pointed out, she is untrained.”

Earth Son smoothed his face to court mask to consider his options. Finally he said, “No, we will not be hampered.”

True Flame nodded and turned to Wolf. “Have you found the maps?”

“Yes. There are four possible sites not counting the fiutana that was located here and the one at the ice house.”

“What maps?” Earth Son growled.

“My domi believes that the oni are camping on fiutana. I had my people pull up the original survey maps for this area, showing the fiutana.”

“Have you scryed out any fiutana?” True Flame asked Earth Son.

“No.”

They waited for Earth Son to elaborate, but he didn’t.

Behind them were shouts and the crack of splintering wood.

Wolf turned to see a massive oni dragon surge up out of the Ghostlands. It shouldered aside the scaffolding, shattering it to pieces. Tinker and Little Horse were falling from their high perch. Little Horse had been near the ladder and was falling with the tumble of heavy timbers. Tinker, though, had been far out at end of the boom, over the liquid blue.

“No!” Wolf shouted as a call on the Wind Clan Spell Stones thrummed across his senses.

Tinker hit the ground, sending up a spray of blue, and then sank down into the ground. Ripples spread out from where she disappeared. And then all sense of her vanished. The Ghostland went smooth and her call to the stones broke off abruptly.

“Wolf!” Stormsong struggled with Little Horse, who had fallen to the “shore” of the Ghostlands and was now trying to fling himself into the blue. “Stop him! He’ll only die! She’s gone already.”

Wolf gasped, feeling her words stab through him. No, Tinker couldn’t be gone.

The dragon scrambled out of the blue, clawing up the shore with feet as large as the Rolls Royce. It shook dirt from its massive head, growling low and loud as thunder. Its seemingly endless body heaved up out of the chaos.

“Wolf!” Stormsong had Little Horse pinned but it left her vulnerable to the dragon now turning its attention to the small figures at its feet.

Wolf called the wind. The dragon’s head whipped toward him as if it sensed the magic gathering around Wolf. He aimed a force strike on the dragon and flung the spell at the beast. As the magic arrowed at the dragon, it crouched low and its mane lifted. A shield effect shimmered into existence. The force strike slammed into the shield and was swallowed up.

Jewel Tears flung up a force wall between the dragon and the elves, curving it to include Stormsong and Little Horse. A fire strike from True Flame hit the dragon’s shield, the blaze curled harmless around it.

The dragon sprang away, landing among the rubble of the fallen bridge.

Wolf started to summon lightening when it leaped again, landing this time on the far section of the bridge still standing, high above the valley. A third leap took it out of sight.

Since the call lightening spell took both hands, he couldn’t cast a scrying spell.

Beside him, Jewel Tears cast a ground scry. “It took flight. I can’t track it through the air.”

True Flame cast his more inclusive, weaker scry of flame. “It’s out of your range already, Wolf.”

Wolf locked his jaw against a growl of impatience, forcing himself to remain silent as he canceled the lightening call. The spell was too dangerous to leave in a potential state. The power neutralized, he started to call the winds to fly after the dragon.

True Flame caught Wolf’s wrist, stilling his hand. “No, I will not allow you to fight it alone. It’s too dangerous.”

“It killed my domi!” Wolf snarled.

“No.” Stormsong dragged Little Horse up to Wolf, as if she was afraid to let the young sekasha go. “Domi’s on the yellow brick road.” Stormsong’s eyes were soft and dreamy. “She’s talked to the wizard. She’s gone now to steal the flying broomstick from the witch and the flying monkeys.”

Tinker fell into the cold blue air. She shouted the trigger to her shields seconds before plunging into the dark blue mass of out-of-phase ground. The blue deepened to midnight black, and then all sensation fell away, as if she had no longer had a body. Was she dead? She had felt the shields form around her in a flood of magic, and the deepening cold of the Ghostlands, but now she sensed nothing.

Suddenly, something hit her from her left. Startled, she lost her shields, and she smacked into a flat, hard surface and then slid down it, to land hard on something horizontal to whatever she struck. Pain shot up from her left leg. She lay panting in darkness. The air was hot, dry, and tainted with smoke. Nearby, water gurgled through unseen pipes. A distant hammering was muffled as if carried through a thick wall.

What had she hit first? Sliding her hand along the smooth floor, she found a right angle that rose up in a wall of steel. But how did she hit a wall sideways when she’d been falling down?

And where was she now?

She sat up and pain jolted up her leg again. Wincing, she felt down to her ankle and discovered that she was bleeding. “Shit.” And then she remembered — she hadn’t been alone on the scaffolding. She searched the area around her with blind hands. “Pony! Oh, gods, Pony!”

There was a loud, metal clank and then the squeal of hinges as a door opened somewhere out in the darkness. Someone was coming. It dawned on her that might not be a good thing; the Ghostlands had been the oni compound. She groped at her side and found her pistol.

A flashlight flicked on some fifty feet away, its light a solid beam in smoky air. As it swept the room, her eyes adjusted, and she made out the figure of a being standing in the open doorway. The shock of hair, the sharp beak of a nose, and the tall lean body suggested a tengu.

She covered her mouth and nose to muffle her breathing.

The tengu moved toward her, shining his flashlight onto pieces of equipment on either side of the room — large tanks, pipes, pumps, and pieces of computer monitoring stations.

’Go away, go away, go away,’ she thought hard at him.

The tengu paused at one of the monitoring stations, checking the gauges there, and then moved to the second one. Grunting at what he found, he turned and ran his light high along the back wall. The beam swept over her head, moved on, stopped and returned to a point a few feet above her.

Gripping her pistol tight, she glanced up to see what caught the tengu’s attention. A smear of fresh blood led down to her.

’Don’t look. Just move on. There’s nothing here to see.’

Inexorable, the light slid downwards to shine on her.

Squinting against the brilliance, she pointed her pistol at the tengu. “That’s far enough.”

“Well, well,” the tengu spoke English with a heavy accent, the flashlight obscuring his features. “You’re what’s down here making so much noise.”

“Where is Pony? What have you done to him?”

Confusion filled the tengu’s face. “We don’t have any ponies here.”

“Where am I?”

“You don’t know?”

“Answer me, damn it!”

“Water storage.”

That explained the tanks, pipes and liquid sounds. “Okay, you’re going to walk me out of here.”

“Walk?” He closed the distance between and crouched down in front of her, twisting the flashlight’s base so it became a lantern, bathing them both in soft light. He was an older version of Riki, from the electric blue eyes under thick unruly black hair to the bird-like cock of his head. “Walk where?”

She tried to hold the gun steady but reaction from her fall was setting in, making her tremble. “Out of this place.”

“You — you want to go outside?”

“Yes.”

“Where exactly do you think we are?” He seemed more puzzled than alarmed, ignoring her gun to search her eyes.

“Water Storage.”

“Which is…where?”

“What is so hard to understand about this? I’ve got a gun and I’m willing use it. You either get me out, or I’ll shoot you.”

“Okay, okay, my English, it’s good but not perfect. I don’t understand what you want, Princess.”

“Oh, please, don’t call me that; technically I am not a princess.”

“Oookay.” He acted like this was a hard concept to wrap his brain around. “What should I call you?”

“Tinker. Of the Wind Clan.”

“I’m Jin Wong.”

Tinker knew she had heard the name before, but she couldn’t place it. “Jin, I want to go home, and you’re going to take me.”

He sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Tinker, but you’re going to need to give me the gun before I can take you anywhere.”

“Like hell.”

“You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.” And she scrambled to her feet to prove it. When she tried to put weight on her left foot, though, pain jolted up her ankle.

Jin had stood with her — as to be expected, he was at least a foot taller than she was. He wore a dark polo shirt with his name embroidered over his heart, dark nylon pants and white socks, all stained with soot, oil and blood. He stepped to her as she sagged back against the wall, hissing against the sudden agony.

“Don’t touch me.” She stopped him by raising the pistol.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Are all you tengu liars at birth?”

“No,” he said after a moment of surprised silence. “Our mothers’ give us lying lessons so we can tell when someone is lying.”

He looked down at her foot to indicate what he thought she was lying about.

“My ankle is just twisted,” Tinker snapped.

“Just to point out the obvious, if you shoot me, you’re going to have to crawl out of here.” He held out his hand. “And I’m not going to let you out of this room with the gun. So just give me the pistol, and I’ll do what you want.”

“I give you my gun and you’ll turn me over to the oni.”

“There are no oni here.”

“Liar.”

“We lie, but tengu still have honor. I give you my word — you won’t be harmed.”

They stood there at impasse, half in shadows, the gun growing heavy in her hand. She had fought to the death before, but she’d never shot someone in cold blood. She wasn’t sure she could actually do it and live with herself afterwards — certainly not after exchanging names and carrying on a civil conversation.

“I’m so screwed.” Sighing, she unloaded the pistol, pocketed the clip, checked the chamber and handed him the empty gun.

“I’ll take care of you.” He tucked the pistol between two pipes near the ceiling, way out of her reach. “I promise.”

“Bleah.” She wished she could believe him. Had Riki broken his word? Or had he actually never given her any promises, knowing full well that he couldn’t keep them? She couldn’t remember.

Jin produced sterile bandages out of his pocket and dealt with the shallow, bleeding cut on her ankle. He slipped an arm around her, then and helped her up. As he supported her, they headed toward the door.

The room was a maze of tanks and pipes, gurgling ominously. At the end of the room, they stepped through a low steel door, reminiscent of old submarine movies, and into another low ceiling room of mystery machines. What the hell did the oni have buried under Pittsburgh? She seethed with anger that Rikki hadn’t warned her about this.

“What the hell is this place, anyway?” she asked.

“This is life support.”

She scoffed at that. Life support made it sound like a damn space ship.

At the far end of the room, she could see there was a narrow, tall window. It gave her pause. Who put a window in an underground area? She forced Jin to detour through the equipment to look out it. At first she only saw night sky, above and below them, which confused her more. When she fallen? It was mid-morning — wasn’t it? And how do you fall into the ground and end up above it? The stars more brilliant than she ever seen them. And they seemed to be moving — which really meant she was.

A planet rose on the horizon, filling it completely.

She’d seen enough photos of Earth from orbit to recognize the luminescent blue swirled with gleaming white clouds. The sight of it punched the air out of her; she stood gasping, like a fish suddenly finding itself out of water, trying to get her breath back. The planet rose, filling the window, evidence that the ship she was on was rotating to maintain artificial gravity.

“No — we can’t be — this isn’t possible. This is a trick. I can’t be in space. I was in Pittsburgh. You don’t fall in Pittsburgh and land in orbit.” She couldn’t be in space. Could she? “You don’t fall in Pittsburgh and land in orbit,” she whispered again. But she hadn’t fallen to ground, but into the discontinuity — who knew what all was tied into that knot of realities? “Oh gods, where am I?”

“Apparently quite lost.” Jin tightened his hold on her, as if he expected her to collapse. Considering how weak she suddenly felt, it was probably a good idea.

“Lost! Lost!” cried the crows in her dreams.

She realized where she must be. She had fallen straight to Esme. “You’re part of the tengu crew of the Tianlong Hao.”

“I was the Captain.”

“Was?”

“This is the Dahe Hao.” Jin leaned over her shoulder to tap on the window, drawing her attention back outside. “There’s the Tianlong Hao.”

The ship had continued to rotate and a vast debris field of broke ships slid into view. The great long cylindrical ships were shattered to pieces. Parts were folded like soda cans. The space around them hazed and glittering from frozen moisture and oxygen trapped in the same orbit as the ships. The bodies of astronauts tumbled in among the litter.

She covered her mouth to keep in a cry of dismay. Still her shock came out in low whimpers.

“The Dahe managed to rescue most of my crew minutes after the accident,” Jin said quietly. “We saved crew from the Zhenghe Hao and the Anhe Hao, but the Minghe Hao re-entered before we could get to it, along with parts of what we think was the gate.”

“Jin!” A female voice called from beyond an open hatch. “Did you find what the hell made the loud bang?”

“Yes!” Jin shouted. “We somehow picked up a visitor.”

“What kind of visitor?” The female snapped.

“The gun-waving elfin kind.” Jin shouted.

“Have you fucking flipped?” The female voice drew closer. “An elf?”

“Yes, an elf,” Jin called.

“Jin.” There was something familiar about the female’s voice. “There were no elves on any of the crew lists.”

Jin cocked his head at Tinker and made a slight noise of discovery. “You did fall from Pittsburgh.”

A purple-haired woman appeared at the door and Tinker recognized her. It was Esme. She hadn’t changed from when Lain’s photo had been taken, with the tiny exception of the bandage on her forehead. On her temple was a pink line of recently healed flesh. Like Jin, she was marked with soot, blood, and exhaustion.

“Well, I’ll be fucked.” Esme had Lain’s voice, only slightly more raspy, as if she had shouted her throat raw. “Well, it’s about time you got your scrawny ass up here.”

“You had a gun-waving elf princess on order?” Jin asked.

“Not exactly. I had a dream. And you were there.” Esme pointed at Jin and then Tinker. “And you.”

“I’m starting to understand the appeal of Kansas,” Tinker grumbled.

Jin looked at Tinker in surprise. “You forgot your little dog.”

“I’m Dorothy,” Esme corrected him. “She’s the scarecrow. So, how the hell did you get here?”

“I fell,” Tinker said.

“Down the rabbit hole?” Esme asked.

“More or less,” Tinker said.

“Great, you can get us out of this fucking mess,” Esme asked.

Tinker could only laugh bitterly. “I not even sure where I am, let alone how to get out. What planet is that? Elfhome? Onihida?”

Esme glanced at Jin with narrowing eyes. “Onihida?”

“The tengu homeworld,” Tinker said. “Or don’t you know about the tengu?”

“We’ve covered that little speed bump,” Esme said dryly, still looking at Jin. Then she shrugged. “All things considered, finding out that half the crew isn’t human is just all part of the weirdness.”

“It doesn’t matter which planet it is,” Jin said. “We’ve lost all our shuttles in the crash. We can’t land. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, the ship is designed to support its crew for decades — but we’ve got the survivors of four ships on board.”

“I think its Elfhome.” Esme turned back to Tinker. “At least, Pittsburgh is down there. Every now and then, we pick up a FM station.” Esme named a couple of Pittsburgh radio stations. “It sounds like a fucking war has broken out.”

“More or less,” Tinker said.

“Oh joy.” Esme indicated that they should start in the direction she had come from. “Hopefully you have something other than straw in that head of yours, because I’ve got a mess for you to fix.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the expert?” Tinker let Jin pick her up and carry her. All the little speed bumps, as Esme would put it, had finally gotten the best of her.

“Yes, I am,” Esme lead through the next section of the ship. Smoke hazed the air here, and red lights flashed unattended. “But you’re the scarecrow.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Tinker asked.

“It means what it means,” Esme opened a hatch, stepped through and closed it after Jin. The light was dim in this section, but air was clean. The floor was cluttered with crew sleeping. At a glance, at least half of the sleepers were wounded. “All fucking logic went out the window about seven days ago.”

Stormsong had said that when her dreaming powers had told her that Impatience was no longer a danger to them. Esme sounded like she was operating on the same skewed logic — she wanted Tinker to fix the mess that the colonists were in because the dreams said she would.

Oh great, yet another group of people expecting me to pull rabbits out of my hat.

For the first time in her life, Tinker felt intimidated by a piece of hardware. She knew that a spaceship was a delicate balance of systems, a spider web pretending to be a simple tin can, with the lives of everyone inside dependant on it. “Look, I really don’t know a whole lot about spaceships.”

“I’ll use terms you can understand,” Esme said. “My ship is sinking and I can’t bail fast enough.”

“Okay,” Tinker said. “Exactly how does a spaceship ‘sink’?”

“The jump did something to my computers.” Esme stopped beside a work station with a monitor showing static. The front panel had already been pulled, and the boards inside gleamed softly with magic. “I’m getting — all sorts of weird errors — and I’m starting to lose systems completely.”

“Well, doh,” Tinker dug through her pockets until she found a length of wire and her screwdriver set. “Magic is causing your systems to crash.”

“Magic?” Esme echoed, looking mystified.

Tinker realized that none of the colonist could see the magic. “That’s Elfhome and this universe has magic. Your computer systems aren’t shielded for it.”

“Oh fuck, it is blindingly obvious, isn’t it?” Esme pressed her palm to her forehead, took a deep breath and let it out. “I should have thought of that when I started to dream true again. Okay. This system controls my engines. Right after the crash, I pulled into what should have been a stable orbit and started up the rotation that allows for the artificial gravity. We’re drifting though. If I don’t correct our orbit, we’re going enter the planet’s astrosphere — and my ship is not designed to survive retry.”

“Okay.” Tinker took the lantern from Jin and started to strip it for parts. “We need to first siphon off the magic, and then create shielding for the system. Here’s what I need…”

Tinker had never worked with astronauts before and was amazed how quickly they learned. While Esme had fired the positioning jets to stop the ship’s rotation and pulled them back into a stable orbit, Jin drafted a team of people to drain excess magic off the computer equipment. Despite Esme’s “you’re the scarecrow” statements, everyone seemed hesitant about Tinker actually working with the ship’s systems. After Tinker trained the astronauts, she found herself in a supervisory-only position. She floated in place, stranded by the lack of gravity, with an ice pack strapped to her ankle.

For some reason — whether is was because Tinker missed the event, or because she was the ultimate outsider as an elf, or because she had magically appeared — the astronauts started to tell her their stories. They gone through a harrowing experience, filled with confusion, death, lucky chances, small miracles, and a great deal of heroics. At the core of it all was Esme, riding roughshod over rules and logic, ruthless in purpose, making one lucky guess after another. Esme, everyone agreed, forged a miracle, salvaging what should have been complete disaster.

Even Esme opened up to Tinker when they found themselves alone together. “One summer, while I was in college, I went to visit my older sister on Elfhome. Two months on another world — it seemed like exotic vacation. Then the dreams started — like I had some third eye that had been forced open and I was made to see. Some of what I had to do was so very clear, like changing my master’s degree to astrophysics and applying to NASA. Some of it was — blind faith — that it would matter. Somehow.”

“I hate to tell you this, but I have no idea how to help you beyond this.”

“This buys me time, which is what I needed most, Scarecrow” Esme scowled at her screens. “It gives me a chance to figure out what the fuck to do next.”

“Don’t call me Scarecrow. I rented the movie and watched it. Everyone in that movie was a dysfunctional idiot.”

“You didn’t read the books? The scarecrow is the wisest being in Oz and rules the kingdom after the wizard and Dorothy leaves.”

Tinker found the news vaguely disturbing. “That doesn’t help.”

“It’s like flying blind in the clouds — you have to have faith in what instruments tell you. The dreams tell me that I needed you. Things are still iffy — but I have a chance now to make everything right.”

Tinker was torn between relief and annoyance that Esme seemed to think Tinker’s part was done. She didn’t want to be responsible for all the astronauts, but she didn’t want to be stuck in space either. She didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t even stay decent. Without gravity to constrain it, the skirt of Tinker’s red silk dress developed a life of its own, determined to show off her panties as often as possible. Still, she had hoped they had gotten past all the dream bullshit. She hated not having an obvious direction to go, a clear-cut problem to solve. The path here had been so convoluted, the clues so obscure, that she would have never guessed where it was taking her. She supposed that she could only do everything she could imagine, and hope that one of them was the right thing.

Sighing, Tinker nudged one of the magic sinks. “These are just makeshift. They’ll fill quickly and then leak. We’ll have to burn off the magic until we can create a large, permanent storage tank.”

“How do we do burn it?” Esme asked.

“You burn it off by doing spells,” Tinker explained. “It can be used to create heat, light, cool things off, do healing—”

“Healing?” Jin seized hold of the word, proving that her ‘private’ conversation with Esme had been just an illusion.

Tinker pulled out her datapad and made sure it worked. “Well, I have spells for healing but I don’t know much about—”

Jin didn’t let Tinker finish. He scooped her up and they flew through the ship as if Jin had wings. “We’ve got so many wounded that we’ve wiped out the Dahe’s supplies. Most of the medical supplies on the other ships were destroyed.”

“I really don’t know much about healing,” Tinker finally managed to finish her statement.

“We’re desperate. Some of our people — we can’t do any more for them.”

“Are they tengu?” Tinker asked.

He stopped and looked down at her. “You won’t help us?”

“I didn’t say that — although a ‘please’ would go a long way. It makes a difference what spells I use. Some won’t work on humans — but they might work on tengu.”

“Please, help my people. I beg you. They’re dying.”

She felt shame and anger at the same time that he would think she would let a wounded person die merely because of some biological difference she could barely see. “I’ll do what I can. I just don’t know how much that will be.”

The infirmary was a tiny cramped place stained with blood, filled with people hooked to machines. The beds were more like cocoons with nylon bags holding the patients flat. Jin paused at the first bed to gaze at a blonde man laying there.

“What happened to Chan Way Kay?”

“Sorry, Jin, we lost her.” A man said from back of the room.

“This is Wai Sze Wong,” Jin turned Tinker’s attention to the patient to her other side. “She’s tengu.”

Wai Sze was Black from Tinker’s dream. More a sparrow than a crow, she was a little female with delicate wrists and fingers. Massive bruising on Wai Sze ran the range from deep purple to pale yellow. Apparently they had run out of surgical tape, as black electrical tape held splints on Wai Sze’s left arm and leg in place. The monitors on her showed an unsteady heartbeat.

Tinker gasped in the shock of recognition and the extent of Wai Sze’s injuries. “I–I — can only guess at how to help her.”

“So guess.” Jin gave her a look that spoke of trust and confidence. “We have done all we can, and she’s only getting worse. If you can’t save her, then we’re going to lose her.”

Tinker sighed and tried to think. Riki had recuperated quickly from the savage beating Tinker had given him, so the tengu probably had recuperative powers similar to the elves. Tinker had saved Windwolf’s life with a spell that focused magic into his natural healing powers. The ambient level of the ship, while enough to wreck havoc on the unshielded computer systems, was actually quite low. If the tengu’s ability was close enough to the elves, the same spell might save Wai Sze. She searched the memory of her datapad and found that she did have the spell downloaded.

“Do you have transferable circuit paper?” Tinker asked.

Jin nodded.

“Okay,” Tinker said. “I need the first magic sink we set up, some power leads, and a computer connection so I can print on the circuit paper.”

One of these days she had to learn bio magic. She hated gambling with people’s lives. Hopefully today wasn’t going to be the day that she guessed wrong.

She explained to the doctor how she needed Wai Sze prepped while Jin set people off to fetch the sinks and leads, and then Jin took her to print off the spell.

“If this spell works, we can use it on all the tengu.” She explained to Jin how it focused magic on the tengu’s natural abilities. “But it’s useless on humans. For them, I’ll need to see if there is a spell for their specific injury in my codex. It will be a much slower process.”

“Let’s save the spell onto this system, that way, if Wai Sze shows improvement, I can come back and print off more spells while you start working with the humans.”

When they returned, they found Wai Sze stripped bare to her waist. Burning with embarrassment, Tinker peeled the protective sheet from the circuit paper and pressed the spell to Wai Sze’s small chest as Jin watched her intently. It required a lot of fiddling to make sure it was smoothed down over the hills and valleys of Wai Sze’s breasts. On the female’s hip was a tattoo of a lion overlaying the Leo star constellation, Leo’s heart — the star Regulus — a blaze of blue-white in its chest. Tinker used it to change the subject. “She’s a Leo?”

“Hmm? Oh, that, no, it’s for Gracie’s husband, Leo. He got a tattoo for her in the same place, a little bird.”

Gracie was obviously the Americanization of Wai Szi’s name. Leo was the name of Tinker’s father, killed by the tengu before she was born. Surely it was an odd coincidence. “He’s a tengu?”

“No, Leo was human. He was my college roommate at M.I.T — and my best friend for many years.”

“Was?”

Jin glanced at her sharply. Whatever he saw on her face made his hard look softened. “Leo and Gracie were like Romeo and Juliet. They fell madly in love at first sight. Their families didn’t want them to be together. They got secretly married. And it all ended in senseless tragedy. Leo was killed in an accident, and for the last five years, Gracie has been suicidal with grief. Crows mate for life.”

“Leo’s family didn’t want him to marry her?” Tinker asked. “They knew she was tengu?”

“No. We were Chinese — that was enough.”

Yes, that would have been enough. Much as she loved her grandfather, she knew the truth of his bigotry. She had been wondering why she dreamed of Gracie. Now she could only remember how the little tengu female had endlessly wept in her dreams.

Tinker had taped the leads to power distributor ring of the spell and hooked the other ends to the battery. “You check to make sure all the metal is clear of the spell. It would distort the effect of the spell, which could be deadly. The activation word is pronounced this way.”

Jin listened closely, and then nodded as the outer ring powered up, casting a glowing sphere over the rest of the spell. The healing spell itself kicked in, the timing cycle ring clicking quickly clockwise as the magic flowed through the spell in a steady rhythm. “How long before we can tell if it’s going to work?”

Tinker shrugged. “On an elf, I could tell immediately.”

As they watched, color flushed back into Gracie’s face and her breathing grew deeper. The machines monitoring her health verified that her heart was stabilizing.

Jin clapped his hands, just like an elf would, to summon the attention of the gods to him, and then whispered a prayer. Tinker floated in place, gazing at the female who would have been her mother, if everything had gone differently. Had it been chance that put Gracie on the same ship as Esme — or some dream inspired plan of Tinker’s real mother?

Jin finished his prayer and turned to Tinker. “Thank you. Truly you must have been sent by the gods to us.”

“No, just the wizard of Oz.”