Perhaps she needed to rethink taking a second Hand. How did she find more without stealing them off of Windwolf? “Okay, I understand why Jewel Tear should have offered to Thorne Scratch. Maybe she scares Jewel Tear silly. She did lop off Earth Son’s head.”
“Jewel Tear has many faults, but she is not a coward. I believe that Tiger Eye pressured Jewel Tear into not asking.”
“Why?”
“It would be difficult to put into words.”
“I’m patient.”
Stormsong laughed and pulled on her scale-armor vest. “You are anything but patient. Because I love you, I will try to explain.
“We are considered holy because we are perfect, but perfection has its degrees. While I have my differences with my father, even I have to acknowledge that he is one of the greatest warriors our caste has produced. There are only two or three others that are of his match. Tiger Eye is not of the caliber of Thorne Scratch. He loves his domi well, but he treats her like a child. At the tunnel, Jewel Tear should not have felt the need to whisper her order to him. He should not have then so loudly defied her. It is embarrassing that any First would act in that manner.”
Tinker had thought the two had been disgustingly cute.
“It would be impossible for Tiger Eye to be First to Thorne Scratch. It would only a matter of time before both Hands would look to her as if she were First, and such a division of power would be a catastrophe.”
“The importance of fit,” Tinker said.
“Yes.”
“So, how do we get sekasha to Pittsburgh that we know will fit? I think I should take a second Hand.”
Stormsong hugged her tight, laughing. “Tell me again how you’re patient!”
11: SPELL LOCK
Her Hand was silently unhappy in the loudest way possible. After what Stormsong had told Tinker about Tiger Eye being a bad First, Tinker was hyperaware of Pony’s silence beside her as she carefully examined the chest from the whelping pens. Apparently deemed too dangerous to take deeper into the enclave, it’d been tucked into one of the empty bays of the coach house. Unlike the rough, utilitarian garages of humans, the enclave’s coach house was a shrine to transportation. The floor was paved in a herringbone of glazed brick. The walls were rich stained wood. The beveled glass windows gleamed as if freshly cleaned. Still, the chest managed to positively lurk in the shadows.
The chest was two feet high, three feet wide, and four feet long. It had no seams or joints. It looked like one solid hunk of ironwood, as if the chest been carved out of a tree trunk. An eight-phoneme spell-lock was inscribed in a band, three inches down, marking off the lid. Even standing several feet from the chest, she could feel the active spell hidden within. If the trap was explosive in nature, there was enough oomph to it to level the coach house. Her Hand had a good reason to be unhappy.
“The little dragon said you needed to take possession of it, but he did not say you had to open it,” Pony murmured quietly for only her to hear.
“If I can’t open it safely, I won’t try,” Tinker promised, because she knew Pony would be in blast range.
Personally Tinker could understand Jewel Tear wanting Tiger Eye out of danger’s way. Yet Tinker saw the logic of the male staying beside his domi—there could have been any number of other dangers in the tunnel. They were stronger together as a team than apart.
Tinker was clueless, though, as to how to get the chest open safely. She took reference photos and measurements and then retreated across the driveway to the stable’s hayloft. With the loft door open, she could see the chest where it lurked in the garage. Pony settled beside her, still silent but no longer unhappy.
Magic basically reduced material to possibilities, and spells realigned the material to the desired end. Spell-locks used magic to flip the locked material between two states. Generally an “open” state was where two halves of the material were separate identities, and “closed” was where they merged into one solid object. When Tinker was learning to create spell-locks, she had reduced several hundred pieces of wood down to instant splinters before she figured out how pre-tune the lock material.
The chest was made of ironwood. The super-dense wood had been bioengineered to have the same structural strength of high-quality steel. Normally boards ran an inch and a half thick and required special spells and tools to cut. She assumed that any attempt cut the chest open would most likely trigger the trap. Without knowing what was inside, even if she managed to shut down the active spell, cutting the chest open might damage the contents.
She could use a magic null spell on the chest. That would wipe out the trap, but it would also render the spell-lock inoperative in the “locked” position, forcing her to cut her way into the chest.
What she needed was a set of picks and something akin to tumblers that she could feel her way through. She needed to experiment.
Several exploded pieces of wood later, she remembered why she hated spell-locks.
12: MORNING AFTER
The fire alarm screamed Oilcan awake. It died moments later, a wooden sword through its heart, but its death only muted the sound slightly as the rest of the fire alarms in the condo were still screaming.
“It’s a fire alarm!” he shouted to forestall the death of his other alarms. “Something is burning!”
Sometime during the night, Thorne had pulled on her underwear and arranged her weapons close at hand. She placed her hand against the door and, finding it cool, triggered her shields, jerked open the door, and disappeared down the hall. A moment later, the screams of children joined in that of the fire alarms.
“Shit, shit, shit.” Oilcan grabbed clean boxers, tugging them on one leg at a time as he hopped after her.
Smoke was pouring out of his microwave. Thorne looked like she was considering skewering it. The children were ping-ponging around the living room like frightened mice.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” he shouted over the screaming fire alarms and children to stop Thorne. The microwave was counting down from eighty-seven minutes while a bag of popcorn blazed. He grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall, flipped open the microwave door, and blasted foam over the burning bag. “There, it’s out. We’ve just got to clear out the smoke to stop the alarms.” He wove through the children to open the sliding glass door to the balcony. It was mid-morning outside, surprising him by how late he’d slept in. “It’s all right! It’s all right! The noise will stop in a little while.”
He went to open his front door and discovered the children had built a barricade in front of it out of his recliner and one of his end tables. He picked up the end table and carried it back into the living room. The kitchen counter was covered with his pantry goods. All the boxes and bags, from his baking soda to his polenta — were sitting open. Thankfully they hadn’t figured out how to open the cans.
“I’m sorry,” Merry said. “We were hungry, so I thought we could make pop pop pop.”
“It’s called popcorn.” He gave her the English word. He had made her a bag of it on her first night in Pittsburgh and played her High School Musical. “You should have just woken me up.”
Merry’s glance toward Thorne explained why the children had decided to fend for themselves. This was not the morning he should have slept in.
He muscled the recliner back to where it belonged and then propped open his front door and the building’s main entrance down the hall. He came back into his apartment to discover that the children clearly regarded the open door as more alarming than the nearly naked and armed sekasha.