“You have no idea how disturbing it is that you know how to do that,” Stormsong murmured.
Tinker blushed. “People lock themselves out of their cars all the time. Since we operated a tow truck, they expected us to be able to help them.”
“Cars don’t have these types of locks.”
“This is just the end of the natural progression of experimentation once you begin playing with locks.”
Stormsong laughed, and the lock bleeped as it unlocked.
The body-admittance area was all bare cement, easy to hose down. The place smelled like a hospital, only worse, and their footsteps echoed weirdly.
There seemed to be no one there. It was perfect that the place was deserted, but it was also spooky. The actual morgue was through a series of locked doors that she had to hack the security to get open. She left the doors unlocked behind her so they could leave quickly.
The morgue was one giant walk-in freezer. The door opened to the solid smell of decomposing flesh. There were banks after banks of smaller doors to the drawers that held the actual dead people. The cold made Tinker’s skin goose bump over.
What a smart idea: visit the morgue. Who knew it would be so big?
But it made sense. The Pittsburgh area had once had a population in the millions. Considering they were in the middle of a war, the large facility was probably a good thing, too.
She so didn’t want to start opening drawers. There were dead naked strangers inside. Only way it could be worse was if they weren’t strangers. Gods, surely by now Nathan was safely buried.
Tinker scanned the freezer doors. She was really hoping for labels identifying who was where. The drawers were only numbered. Apparently there was a computerized list somewhere. It would be quicker to open and look than find a computer, hack through its security, and then figure out their filing system.
She just hated how icky it was going to be. It did not help that her Hand looked as freaked out as she felt. From what Windwolf told her in the past, elves had very little experience with the dead. Counting her grandfather, she had known more than a dozen people that died of old age. Morgues, funerals, and graveyards were human territory.
At least when she cracked open the first drawer, she found herself looking down at a bag-shrouded face and not bare feet. She should probably get gloves on and a mask.
After the first dozen or so times, she kind of got used to unzipping the bag and finding someone dead underneath the heavy plastic.
A systematic search was going to take forever. It took longer than she expected to pull out a drawer, unzip the bag, verify that it wasn’t an elf inside, zip it back up, and get the drawer back into place with the door closed. It was going to take hours, and every minute they spent at the morgue increased the risk of being caught.
Tinker was reconsidering taking the time to hack their computer system when she realized that Pony and Stormsong were in full Shield mode; close enough to her to cover her with their protective spells, hands riding on their swords, their focus toward the front door. “What is it?”
“Someone is coming,” Stormsong said.
“Shit,” Tinker whispered.
Tinker heard footsteps nearing, and a moment later the far door opened. “Hello?” a woman bellowed, and only when she yelped, “Nae, nae, nae! Scarecrow! Call off your dogs!” did Tinker recognize Esme’s voice.
“Hold!” Pony called to the others.
Esme came stomping up the hallway, ignoring the elves now that they had stood down. It was still weird looking at Esme and knowing that she was her mother. Due to a fluke in the hyper-phase gate design, Esme had spent all of Tinker’s life stuck in one moment in time and hadn’t aged. She was still only a few years older than Tinker. Like Lain, Esme was a head taller than Tinker could ever hope to get, boyishly thin, and, judging by the color of her eyelashes, a pale blonde under the purple hair dye. Despite a week of hospital rest, Esme looked haggard. She still wore her torn, bloody, and soot-smudged jumpsuit.
“I keep running into you at the strangest places,” Esme said. “What are you doing here, Scarecrow?”
If Tinker ever heard a stupid question, that was it. Breaking into the morgue was so blatant, it had to be obvious. “I’ve got official business here. What are you doing here?”
“Last I checked,” Esme said, “I’m here because a snarky elf princess landed me in Pittsburgh.”
Tinker shook her finger at Esme in frustration. “I saved your ass.”
“Yes, you did.” Esme scrubbed at her face as if she was exhausted. “I’m sorry; it’s all just hitting me hard. Everything I’ve been working for is over and done, and I’m here, and I’m not going to be stuck out in space, trying to piece together a life on whatever was left of a colony on the other side of the galaxy that’s been hit by a major disaster. I’m stuck on Elfhome — in a city that’s been hit by a major disaster — so there’s sixty thousand humans instead of a few hundred — and there’s oni and tengu and a talking dragon. And last week was eighteen years ago.”
Tinker winced. It hadn’t occurred to her that Esme was facing such a wrenching mental readjustment. The tengu had been taking it all in stride, but they knew about the tengu, oni, and talking dragon going in. When all was said and done, Esme had risked her life to save countless others.
“I don’t want to talk about what I’m doing here,” Tinker admitted reluctantly. “Because it could get me killed.”
“Oh.” Esme’s eyebrows knitted into worry. “Maybe you should just leave. I had a bad dream.”
“You dreamed about domi?” Pony asked, making Tinker realize that they’d been speaking Elvish with a smattering of English.
Esme shook her head. “No. I–I’ve been looking for someone. I had a dream about the place where he used to live. I dreamed of him running through the big empty rooms, laughing in hazy sunlight, and when I woke up in the hospital, it suddenly hit me that I could see him. I never thought I’d actually get to see him, and I just about lost it when I realized I would.”
“Him?” Tinker was feeling slightly betrayed. Esme realized that eighteen years had past and went looking for an old lover? Did she even remember she had left a kid behind?
Esme gave a laugh that edged along mania. “When I checked out of the hospital, I had some vague plan of calling my sister, but I just kept walking and walking. I hiked the whole way to the island. The place is in ruins — no one has lived there for years. The place looks like it was ransacked. There were pencil marks and dates on the wall — a record of him getting taller and taller — and then five years ago, it just stops!”
Tinker’s grandfather must have only told Esme that he was calling his grandchild Alexander Graham Bell. Esme was looking for a son. From the sound of it, Esme had gone to the abandoned hotel on Neville Island where Tinker had grown up. After their grandfather died, Oilcan had talked her into moving to McKees Rocks. He moved their grandfather’s books and files to safe storage, leaving behind all their childhood clutter, and boarded shut the hotel.
“There were all the little bits of him scattered around,” Esme said wistfully. “Little toy robots and model airplanes and one hallway that had tiny little handprints all up and down it in blue paint — okay, that was kind of Blair Witch creepy — but it was his hands. And he had the constellations done in glow-in-the-dark paint on his ceiling — just like I had when I was a kid.”
Lain had helped Tinker paint the stars, muttering darkly, “Nature or nurture?”