“Spell-working is really at the heart of why the elves so vehemently oppose the oni. The greater bloods practice wholesale bioengineering on their people. The tengu were humans that an oni greater blood spell-worked as punishment for resisting their takeover. He merged them with the crows who were feasting on their dead fathers and brothers.”
Lain sighed. “Yes, I understand that applying bioengineering indiscriminately to sentient beings is morally wrong. But there is so much that the elves and even the oni could teach us. Most biologists coming to Pittsburgh from Earth look down their noses at the ‘primitive’ elves without realizing that the elves had been manipulating DNA with magic for thousands of years before we even began to imagine what it was.”
Tinker didn’t want to stand and argue the point in front of Stormsong. She was fairly certain that Stormsong wouldn’t hurt Lain, but she didn’t want to find out the hard way that she was mistaken. Being wrong once was enough. “Lain. Really?” Tinker motioned to the sapling dashing madly about the nursery bed. “A food we need to chase down and catch?”
Lain scoffed but allowed the subject to be changed back to the saplings. “I’m going to have to do something with them before they get much larger. Based on what I learned from the mature tree, I think they’ll freeze nicely. I could thaw them out one at a time to study.”
“Monster popsicles,” Tinker said. “Black-willow flavored.”
Lain smiled at her; a rare and treasured thing. “I’ve missed you.”
Three little words that made Tinker’s heart seize up. While she was growing up, Lain was the closest thing to a mother that she had. Betrayed couldn’t describe how Tinker felt when she learned that Lain had lied to her every day of her life — she let Tinker believe that they weren’t related when in truth Lain was her aunt. She had to cling to the knowledge that Lain had always been there for her. Lain had nursed her through childhood colds, stitched up cuts, cleaned out wounds, taught her how to deal with the mysteries of menstruation, and expanded her knowledge past quantum physics. Without Lain, she wouldn’t have been able to save Windwolf’s life, escape from the oni, or anything. And wasn’t that the truly important thing? “Yeah. I’ve missed you, too.”
Lain took Tinker’s right hand and ran light fingers over the spectacular purples and yellows mottling her forearm. “Did you break it?”
Tinker tried not to wince as the feather touch still gave her tinges of pain. “It was just a hairline fracture. I basically slept for a week while the healing spells were running, and it’s back to new.”
“With all our science, we still can’t heal a bone that fast.”
“The spell focuses magic onto the elves’ regenerative powers, puts it into hyper-drive, which is why I slept for most of the week. Also ate like a pig every time I woke up — which also meant I spent the rest of my awake time in the bathroom. It was a really annoying week.”
Lain kissed her on the forehead. “I was worried about you, ladybug. I’m glad to see you’re looking like your old self.”
“It’s the shirt.” Tinker didn’t want to go out in just a camisole, so she had raided Stormsong’s bedroom again. The result was yet another of Roach’s limited editions: a hoverbike sliding sideways through a cloud of dust that spelled out “Tinker.” (She wouldn’t have borrowed it, but Stormsong had pulled it over her head and grinned.)
Lain hugged her and then let her go. “I had a feeling that you would be coming to see me, so I made cookies and lemonade.”
A rifle was lying on the island of Lain’s sprawling kitchen. It was Lain’s Winchester. The twenty-two-caliber rifle was the least powerful of Lain’s guns, just a popgun when compared to her Barrett Light Fifty. Any trip into Elfhome’s virgin forest required a gun and often a flamethrower. Lain used to collect samples of Elfhome plants, kept them in quarantine for a month, and then shipped them to Earth during Shutdown.
“Are you going out?” Tinker sighed as she realized that Pony and Stormsong had drifted between her and Lain. She wanted to smack them for acting suspicious of Lain. In truth, though, she couldn’t entirely blame them. They had been there when Lain finally admitted the truth. They had seen how badly Tinker lost it. They knew how crazy Lain and her sister Esme — Tinker’s real biological mother — had made Tinker.
“I’ve been having a problem with groundhogs.” Lain took a pitcher of lemonade out of the refrigerator and set it beside the rifle, making the sekasha twitch. “I expanded my outside beds and planted them all with keva beans. The damn rodents act like I set up a feeding trough.”
Since Lain didn’t need the rifle for anything life threatening, Tinker picked it up and carried it to the gun rack in the center hallway. The Barrett Light Fifty was missing. The big gun was protection against the giant reptilian saurus; it was extreme overkill for groundhogs. What was Lain thinking? “Why aren’t you using your live traps?”
“I thought it would be good for my neighbors to know that this little old crippled lady was armed.”
The neighborhood of Observatory Hill had been quite wealthy at the end of the eighteenth century and was filled with grand Victorian houses. Lain lived on the edge of the scientific commune huddled around Allegheny Observatory. Her mansion sat apart from the houses that had been converted into dorms for the rotating base of Earth scientists that came to Elfhome to study the parallel universe. The distance of Lain’s home from the dorms reflected the fact that normally only Lain lived in Pittsburgh while all the other scientists were transient. That of course changed when Tinker destroyed the hyper-phase gate that shuffled Pittsburgh back and forth between the two worlds.
It was disturbing to realize that all of Lain’s neighbors had been on Elfhome for only a couple of months. They were complete strangers who had signed up for a thirty-day visit to an alien planet and found themselves stranded. “They’re scientists! Do you really think they’d attack you?”
“I don’t know them, ladybug, and they don’t know me.”
Tinker considered the missing Barrett and how it sounded like a cannon when shot. “At this rate, they might be afraid to get to know you.”
“That would be fine with me,” Lain said, and Tinker knew that Lain meant it. “Fiercely private” must run in the family. Before Tinker became an elf, she spent days alone at her salvage yard, focusing on her inventions. Looking back, though, she knew that deep down she’d been lonely.
Was Lain lonely? Tinker, at least, had Oilcan while she had been in her mad-scientist phase. He was always quietly but intensely protective of Tinker. Everyone in Pittsburgh knew that the cousins fought as a tag team.
“It’s going to be a rough winter,” Lain called. “Everyone up here knows that I’ve been laying in stores of food. Not that I made a point of telling anyone, but an acre of keva beans is hard to miss. These newcomers don’t know me. As far as they’re concerned, I’m just a harmless crippled geek.”
Tinker suddenly hated the idea of Lain being alone. “Is Esme staying with you?”
There was no answer from the kitchen except extremely loud rattling of silverware. Apparently Tinker wasn’t the only one annoyed with Lain’s little sister.
Tinker put the Winchester in its place and relocked the gun rack. The rifle safely locked away, the sekasha drifted off, giving Tinker the illusion of privacy as she went back to the kitchen. “Have you seen Esme?”
Lain laughed. “If you count watching her sleep at Mercy Hospital, yes, I’ve seen her. She apparently was suffering mostly from exhaustion. When I went back yesterday, she had checked herself out and left.”