“Shit!” Jane breathed out the curse, her mind racing. She pulled out her phone, dialing Duff, even as she charged downstairs.
Boo followed behind her. “Jane? Jane? What is Kajo going to do?”
Duff answered his phone with, “You know, I got to thinking, I could ask her — the girl I kind of like. It would be a weird first date but then she would know what she was getting into — although she probably knew that after the entire namazu thing—”
“Duff, activate all our troops!” Jane ordered.
“What?” Duff and Boo both cried.
“Kajo works in layers. The black willows were to distract the tengu out of Turtle Creek, but the trees would have walked right into the back of the enclaves. He wanted the black willows to soften up the elves’ defenses prior to his push into Oakland.”
“Putting out the blast,” Duff said. “Activating all troops. What’s happening?”
“Kajo is looking for a large source of magic,” Jane said. “He was heading to Turtle Creek first. I think he plans to target the spell at the elves. Once he triggers the spell, he’s probably going to unleash an attack on Oakland to take out the enclaves.”
“You don’t think he’s going to target humans?” Duff said. “We’re heavily armed and outnumber almost everything on this continent.”
“It’s a genetically keyed bomb. The humans in Pittsburgh range from Chinese to African to Vikings with even some Neanderthal randomly mixed in. If he’s smart — and he is — he’ll use the first bomb to take out the elves’ heavy hitters: the domana.”
Duff cursed. “Windwolf is deep in the forest surrounded by the entire oni army.”
“Not all of it.” Jane paused in Marc’s living room. Through the massive windows, she could see down the Ohio River to Brunot Island and up the Monongahela to Panther Hollow. The only movement on the water was from schools of jump fish. The skies were heavily overcast with rain clouds creating a thick blanket of gray. “Kajo probably has a platoon or a full company that has come upriver from somewhere around Wheeling. He’s got barges, so he has at least one tugboat.”
“They would have to get past…I don’t know — a half dozen lock and dams?” Duff said. “A dozen?”
Jane closed her eyes and thought hard. She’d spent an entire week in July looking for the namazu nests. She’d gotten to know the three rivers intimately. There was a lock and dam on the Ohio at Neville Island. The Allegheny’s lock-and-dam system had remained on Earth. Monongahela’s first dam was near Turtle Creek. Law had spotted Kajo in the forest north of Turtle Creek, heading south. It wouldn’t make sense for him to boat up to the first dam and then hike in a huge circle. It would make sense if he’d cut through the forest north of Oakland, heading west to east.
Where would she put a large attack force in the west, where it wouldn’t be easily stumbled over by humans or spotted by tengu who would have been flying up the Allegheny to reach Haven?
“Did any of our scouts go out to Herr Island?” Jane said.
“Where’s that?” Duff said, which meant that the answer was probably “No.”
“It’s on the Allegheny River, under the Thirty-First Street Bridge,” Jane said. “The Rim cuts right across it. Half of it is a bunch of abandoned office buildings and other half is virgin forest.”
“If it’s that’s close to the city, then it might still be connected to the traffic cameras,” Duff said. “Hold on!”
“Wait!” But the line had gone quiet as Duff put her on hold. Duff was using the phone system at the bakery that had multiple landlines with the ability to have several lines connected at once. He was probably calling his computer guru bunny.
Jane pulled out her ancient pocket radio and turned it on. Marti Wulfow was spilling out coded orders for all militia troops to assemble in Oakland. Duff had gotten the blast out before checking the cameras. “Good boy!”
“Boo, the others went to the radio station.” Jane trotted down to the garage stairs. Boo followed her, wings fluttering nervously. “I’m going to pick them up. Stay here, wait for Marc.”
Jane hit the power button on the garage door. It rattled upward. “I won’t have time to fill Marc in completely. I need you to—”
“Hello?” Roach ducked down to look under the rising garage door. His hair was still damp from a shower and he was holding a stuffed bear and a box of candy. He stared at Boo’s wings with stunned surprise. “Oh. Um. Hi.”
Oh, shit, she had forgotten Roach was meeting her at Marc’s.
“Billy!” Boo cried and leapt at him.
Roach’s dismay vanished to a huge grin. “Baby Boo!” He dropped the presents to swing her around in a circle. “Baby Boo, you’re found! You’re found!”
“We have incoming!” Duff suddenly came back on the line. “Incoming on Liberty Avenue heading east toward—”
The line went dead.
“Duff? Duff?” She checked her signal. No bars. The cell phone network was down. Jane realized that her pocket radio had gone to static. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The automatic light on the garage door had gone off too. Jane flipped the light switch beside the power button. The big shop lights stayed dark. The power had gone out. WQED might have a backup generator but the underground pirate station of WESA probably didn’t.
“Damn, damn, damn, damn,” Jane swore as she scrambled into her SUV. In the glove box were the radio headsets that they’d pulled together just for this type of emergency. “This is Beater One, are we good?”
“Oh, thank God!” Duff said over the headset. “Power is out here. I don’t know what to do.”
They had had to return the headsets that they’d borrowed from Team Tinker in July but had spent the last two months finding replacements. Only a handful of their team leaders had one and they wouldn’t be able to contact their squad members if the phones were out.
“I’ll see what can be done about Bullhorn.” Jane used their code word for WESA. She dug out her map of Pittsburgh. There was a steep ravine between the river and the enclaves. There were only two bridges across it until Liberty Avenue climbed high enough to meet the plateau that Oakland rested on. “Have our teams head for Orphan’s.”
“Roger that,” Duff said.
Her team came jogging up the street, saving her from having to decide what to do with Boo.
“Duff pulled the trigger,” Taggart said. “He didn’t give a rendezvous point past Oakland. What’s up?”
Jane explained the oni attack. “They’ve taken out the cell phone towers and the power system. They’re going to attack the enclaves. I’m having Duff send our people to Sacred Heart.”
“Wait, what?” Roach said. “Oakland is under attack? Andy, Guy, and Geoffrey are at — oh, wait — Andy and Guy were going with Oilcan to move something heavy. They said something about ice cream. I think they’re on the South Side. Maybe. Depends on how long the trip took. Geoff wanted to watch the elves build the wall.”
Jane cursed. “I’m going to Oakland.”
“I’m coming with you,” Taggart said. Her dismay must have shown on her face. “Surprise attacks by insurgents used to be my morning wake-up call.”
Jane nodded and turned to Marc. She wanted to head off her little brother from trying to come with her. If he did, Boo would want to come too. “Find a generator and get it hooked up to Bullhorn. We need them back on the air.”
“I can help,” Roach said.
As Jane made sure that her little brother nodded in compliance, she realized that Hal had detoured to the back of her SUV. He was getting something out of his backup bag. “Hal, what are you doing?”
“I realized long ago that our technical prowess was also our greatest weakness. I decided to rely on a more primitive and thus more robust method to spread the news of attack.”