Tommy jerked to a stop. “You moved us to a greater blood camp? You said you found someplace safe!”
“It’s safe.” Bingo waved away Tommy’s concern. “The greater bloods abandoned it years ago — not that anyone seemed to notice. We needed someplace big, what with the others losing their places in the train derail—”
Tommy smacked Bingo in the head. “Stupid! The greater bloods burn down the places that they don’t plan to use again! They’ll be back!”
“No, they won’t!” Bingo cried. “They stripped out all the rooms that they were using instead of burning the whole place. The biggest apartment upstairs — the one with three bedrooms — has been gutted. They even took down the wallpaper and ripped out the carpet. Half of the sweet rooms like this one had all the beds and chairs and dressers taken out — which isn’t all bad. The little ones are using them as playrooms. I thought about this hard! I talked to Mokoto and Trixie and even my mom and our aunties. We think that the greater bloods couldn’t burn this place without the wrong people taking notice. It’s a big, historic building in the middle of Downtown, not some house out in the boonies. Presidents of the United States have stayed at this hotel.”
“Maybe.” Tommy wasn’t sure. His father had been the commander of the lesser bloods; he’d murdered Tommy’s mother and didn’t give a shit if Tommy lived or died. Tommy only knew about the greater bloods from a lifetime of chance remarks. “I don’t have time for this.”
“I figured if the oni could waltz in and out of this hotel without anyone knowing what they were doing, that we could use it too.” Bingo continued to defend his choice.
“Things have changed.” Tommy found the drawer holding his shirts. Were all his shirts black? He dug out his only blue one; if he was going out to Oakland, he wanted to be recognized as one of the good guys. “Downtown is full of royal marines, and what’s left of the EIA knows that we exist.”
“There’s ways in and out so people can’t see us coming and going.” Bingo plowed on in the hotel’s defense. “Besides, I thought we were with the elves now — all part of working with Oilcan.”
“Oilcan isn’t a god,” Tommy went through the other drawers, looking for clean pants. The blue jeans that he’d taken off the night before were covered with dirt and blood. “Oilcan isn’t going to be down here, making sure each new train full of marines know that we’re to be left alone. Even if he was down here, I don’t know if he could stop them if they wanted to screw with us. Being made an elf hasn’t changed him; he’s still a little pacifist squirt.”
“Then why team up with him?” Bingo asked.
“Because I said so!” Tommy didn’t want to go into what Jin had told him about creating peace nor his own emotional journey to come to his decision. None of the drawers had jeans. Where were his jeans? “I need you to go out and find someplace else for us to live. Oilcan called and said they needed me at some kind of war conference.”
“We’re going to fight the oni?” Bingo’s voice was filled with fearful doubt. “With Oilcan calling the shots?”
“When did Team Tinker ever start a fight?” Tommy opened the closet and found his blue jeans hanging up on wooden hangers. He took a pair out and pulled them on.
Bingo worked through being unhappy about being wrong to realizing what it meant for the half-oni. “Never, but Team Tinker always won any fight they got into.”
“Exactly.” Tommy pulled on socks and boots. “I think Tinker and Oilcan just want to pump me for information about my father’s warriors. They’ve already called in the tengu, but my father never trusted them completely.”
“Your father never trusted anyone completely,” Bingo said.
Tommy grunted and opened the door to the hall. Bingo’s eight-year-old little brother, Spot, sat on the floor opposite the door. Spot looked up with silent expectation.
“I’m going to Poppymeadows,” Tommy said to crush any hope that Spot had about going back to Sacred Heart. The day before, Tommy had taken a carload of his younger cousins with him, saying that they needed to socialize more with people outside the half-oni. It had been an excuse to give Tommy the freedom to roam the building, looking for Jewel Tear.
Spot had found a soulmate at Sacred Heart; a cute little elf girl by the name of Baby Duck.
“Poppymeadows is on the other end of the street from Sacred Heart.” Tommy headed down the hall. The hotel put him on edge. It was too nice. Even their old place above their Oakland restaurant hadn’t been this nice. It made him feel like he’d fallen into a movie.
“I need you to find someplace else for us,” Tommy told Bingo as they walked toward the stairwell. The building had elevators but they hadn’t gotten them running yet. On the theory that no one could or would quietly climb seventeen flights to attack them, Mokoto set them up on the top three floors.
“This place is nice,” Bingo whined. “Even at the restaurant we were always on top of each other. One newborn with colic could keep everyone up. All of us grown kids have our own room now so we don’t have to deal with the little ones. No more sharp elbows in the middle of the night. No more waking up in someone else’s pee. No more waiting to piss. There’s a big industrial kitchen in the basement and the bar is still fully stocked.”
“It’s too nice,” Tommy said. “There’s no way we could defend the lobby. The doors are glass and there’s two dozen twenty-foot-tall windows. If someone just set a big enough fire, they could burn us out. There would be no need for them to climb seventeen floors.”
“I’ve set guards on all the entrances.” Bingo said. “We’ve got more teens and adults now.”
The stairwell obviously had only been meant to be used in an emergency. It was a bare echoing place. Tommy found it comforting after the richness of the hallway.
“We made nice with the elves,” Bingo said as he followed Tommy down the steps. “Sooner or later, they will leave us alone — won’t they? Why can’t we have a nice place like this?”
“Because we can’t afford it. I don’t know where the power is coming from…”
“It was on when we got here.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. The greater bloods had some kind of system in place. Either it was on some kind of automated payment plan, or one of them was writing a check every month, or they have some kind of illegal tap. It doesn’t matter which, we can’t count on it continuing even another day. Tomorrow the power company might find the tap or the bank might stop the payments because we’re cut off from Earth or the elves cut off the head of whoever was paying the bills. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to pay for the power and we don’t have that kind of money. More importantly, we certainly won’t be able to heat a building this size come winter. At that point it becomes twenty floors of frozen pipes.”
A herd of children between the ages of six and twelve burst through the door — all in their underwear — to charge down the steps ahead of him. They’d picked up more adults and teens with the addition of the other households but they’d also doubled the number of little kids. There were more than two dozen children heading downstairs, laughing and shouting.
“Where the hell are they going in their underwear?” Tommy asked.
“They’re probably going swimming,” Bingo said.