“Kajo had creatures he called horrors,” Boo said with uncertainty.
“Horrors?” Jane echoed.
“We were watching a movie one time. I didn’t like it. It was this little girl who was taken by a monster and her family was trying to save her. Danni came in and asked what we were watching. Kajo said, ‘A movie about a kaiju’ and Danni didn’t know what a kaiju was, so Kajo said, ‘It’s a horror — a river horror.’ Danni saw how much the movie upset me and made me watch it to the end. She had figured out that the little girl in the movie would die.”
The more Jane learned about this bitch Danni, the more she wanted to kill her.
Boo continued. “The oni had been developing monsters on Onihida. They couldn’t get them from their world to Elfhome — not with half the Earth between their two access points. That’s why they kidnapped Tinker domi. If they had managed to keep her gate to Onihida open, they could have brought all their monsters and troops through the gate. Before they came up with the idea for the gate, they focused on smuggling in genetic material to build monsters with.”
“Were the namazu the only horrors Kajo has here in Pittsburgh?”
Boo gave her a look that said that she didn’t know for sure. She whispered, “Kajo never trusted me. He said he couldn’t tell me because the Eyes would kill me if I knew too much.”
Jane wanted to be sure that Danni died slowly. She tried to coax out a little more information. “You think there are more horrors than just the namazu?”
“They would let things slip.” Boo said. “Little things. By themselves, it meant nothing, but after a while, you could piece things together. Every Shutdown, the oni would ship a vast amount of goods to Pittsburgh. A lot of it was legal to import like food, blankets, clothing, and building materials. Kajo had underlings that handled those shipments. He was never involved unless it was some luxury item that he thought his underlings would keep for themselves. Caviar. Kobe steak. European chocolate. Cashmere sweaters. Silk sheets. If was something illegal, like guns, Lord Tomtom handled the deliveries on the theory that if something went wrong, only his people would take the fall. Now and then, though, the oni would bring something in that required everyone to work together to make sure it crossed safely.”
Boo reached out and gripped Jane’s hand tightly. “That’s what Kajo was doing in the Strip District the day I saw him with Danni. The day he took me. He was supervising the delivery of something too important to trust to Lord Tomtom. It was in this big shadowy warehouse. After I’d been tied up and gagged, they gathered across the room where there was a large animal in a wooden crate. It was hurt. I could smell blood and hear it making sounds of pain. They were talking in Oni and I didn’t know the language yet. There’s a lot of words, though, that Oni doesn’t have. Truck. Gun. Highway. Computer. Internet. When you’re talking in Oni and you hit one of those words, sometimes the rest of the sentence comes out in English. Kajo and Lord Tomtom flowed in and out of English as they talked about what to do with what was in the crate. The conversation made no sense to me, but helpless as I was, it is forever etched into my mind.
“They smuggle genetic material for horrors onto Elfhome inside large pregnant animals, like cows or horses. They decided to kill whatever was in the crate because it was making so much noise. I think it was a cow. I didn’t see whatever came out of it. Lord Tomtom was unimpressed by it. ‘It’s just a building block,’ Kajo said. ‘A tiny piece for something bigger.’ That made Lord Tomtom laugh and say, ‘Tiny? Yes! Everything you’ve made is far too small to be a horror.’ Kajo dismissed his complaint with, ‘We can make them bigger anytime. Temperament is more important than size.’ Danni took possession of whatever it was to get it safely out of the city; I don’t know what she did with it. I know that Kajo went several times down to the Strip District during Shutdown to handle something that he didn’t trust Lord Tomtom with, but I never went with him and he would never talk about it later.”
Jane took deep breaths, not wanting to rage in front of Boo. Her baby sister didn’t need her anger. She couldn’t imagine the terror that Boo had gone through that day, unsure if the oni would slaughter her as casually as they killed the animal in the crate.
“I’m sorry I’m so useless.” Boo’s voice broke with emotion. “I knew that in the end everyone in Pittsburgh would be in danger. They would talk casually about how they would deal with the police and the EIA. I should have worked harder to learn what they were doing but I was too scared. Anytime I tried to learn more, one of the Eyes would say, ‘I know what you’re doing,’ and then tell me exactly what I had planned. It was if they crawled into my head and listened to my thoughts. They always knew. I couldn’t do anything.”
“Oh, baby!” Jane gathered Boo into her arms and held her tight. “You stayed alive! That’s all that matters! That’s all we wanted! We just wanted you back, safe and sound.”
Boo tried not to cry but slowly her defenses crumbled until she was wailing ugly tears. “I’m so useless! Useless!”
Jane rocked her, trying to figure out how to make this right. Boo was a deep well of knowledge, but it was so fragmented and every “I don’t know” would cut deep. Worse, Boo would feel responsible for every death and disaster that happened in the upcoming conflict. She would feel like she could have prevented it. This was Jane’s fault for letting the fear of what she might learn keep her from trying to pump Boo for information. She should have just opened the taps, let everything pour out. It would have let Boo feel useful.
“You’re not useless,” Jane said. “We should have been asking you more questions. You have no idea what we need to know, so how can you know what to tell us? Let’s see what we can figure out about what is happening now with the trees.”
Boo nodded, sniffing loudly, but at least she stopped crying.
“Let’s start simply,” Jane said. “It’s okay if you can’t answer me. I need to know where the holes are before we can try to fill them. Okay? Now, where did you live when you were with Kajo?”
Boo sniffed again and wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “We moved around a lot — usually during Shutdown. I think it was so that Pure Radiance couldn’t ‘see’ what we were doing. The Eyes were blind to what was happening on Earth when they were on Elfhome and vice versa. During the winter we lived someplace in the city, usually somewhere fairly deserted. The nicest place was a cul-de-sac in Mount Lebanon; Kajo and I lived in a big stone house with fairy-tale-sized fireplaces and lattice windows. I felt like Rapunzel or Belle — a girl who wasn’t a princess being held captive in a castle by a monster. The worst place was a hotel downtown. It should have been the nicest; it was deluxe three-bedroom suite. I could see all of Downtown from the windows. They put bars on the inside of the windows and doors, though, making it one big prison cell. I wasn’t allowed out all winter. There was a television but it didn’t work. All I could do during the day was sleep or read or do homework.”
“Homework?” Jane echoed in surprise.
Boo puffed up her cheeks in embarrassed anger. “Kajo made me do schoolwork. He got these workbooks from Earth: one hundred and eighty days of boring stuff that I’d never get to use because I was never going to get away from him. I had to do six pages every day. I was up to eighth grade before he transformed me into a tengu and abandoned me at Sandcastle. In the evenings, if he didn’t have to go out and oversee something, we would play shogi.”