“Open up, let me see what you have in your mouth,” Hal murmured quietly. He was kneeling beside the credenza with a small striped snake in hand. The “wee thing” looked only slightly bigger than a ballpoint pen. “Winner, winner, chicken dinner!”
In Hal-talk, it meant that the snake was venomous.
“Hal!” Jane snapped. “Get that into some kind of cage!”
The naturalists set off in search of a secure container, snake in hand.
“What does he have?” her mother asked.
“A cute deadly snake that Nigel carried into the building in his pants pocket.” Jane snapped her fingers and indicated that Taggart should follow. The collective common sense of the naturalists was about on par with a five-year-old.
Her mother sighed. “Boys and their trouser snakes.”
“Mom!” What was she saying to her mother? “I don’t have a lot of friends. I’ve really focused on my job for the last eight years.”
“Which was not entirely a good thing,” her mother said. “I’m sure, though, you have more friends than you realize. Just ask some of the girls at WQED. You’ll need to hurry, though, we only have a few days to get their dresses made. Call me with their dress sizes.”
Her mother said goodbye and hung up while Jane was trying to figure out some sane answer.
There were certain things that Jane knew was fact. Her mother had spent twenty-six years dreaming of Jane’s wedding. Having been married shortly before her own husband was shipped off to war, her mother didn’t see the oni menace as an excuse not to celebrate the day. She would move hell and high water to make sure it was perfect. She would not be stopped. Anyone who got in her way would pay dearly.
To keep peace in the family, Jane needed to call her cousins and let them know the truth. But first, she needed to find two women she could trust not to betray her family’s secrets.
There were plenty of women at WQED. In theory, Jane knew everyone who worked for the station. She’d started as a production assistant eight years ago. She could walk through the building and name all her female coworkers. Courtney. Stephanie. Chelsea. Jasmine. Virginia. A score more.
She really didn’t know them, though. Most of her time was out in the field, with Hal and a camera. She came to the building to have their truck serviced by the motor pool, drop paperwork with Accounting, update legal (when Hal set something or someone on fire — which happened much more often than one imagined), and monitor postproduction work.
Hal got dangerous when he was bored and anything that didn’t put him in a spotlight bored him, which was why Jane and Hal rarely worked in the offices. They didn’t even have permanent desks. Jane did her paperwork at home or in the production truck or at any flat surface not currently being used at the station — hence the reason that her team camped out in the old Mr. Rogers studio from time to time.
She had always been a bit of an outsider at the station. She was a local. She was younger than most of the women — taller — louder — more prone to violence — heavily armed…
Frankly, she scared all of her coworkers.
Most of the women at the station had come to Elfhome from Earth. They were highly educated, idealistic, and inexperienced in violence. Jane would roll in from the field — often covered in blood — and usually angry enough to beat something or someone to death. A monster. Hal. A local government official. All of the above.
And then there was how she got her job…
Her family had three passions: cooking, guns, and cameras. It wasn’t a family outing without all three. She got her first camera when she was ten at a cookout at the family’s shooting range. Her grandfather patiently explained framing a picture and composition.
“It’s just like a gun,” he said since she been shooting rifles since she was six. “You want whatever you target in the crosshairs so it stays in focus. Keep the camera steady. Don’t jerk about but smoothly follow the target as it moves.”
Her grandfather had been to Africa to take pictures of animals she had only seen in The Lion King.
“You kill only to live,” he told her. “Be it an animal or another human being. Life is a sacred thing. Recording life is a way to honor it.”
Up to Boo’s disappearance, Jane had been torn between callings. She liked to cook but she wasn’t sure she wanted to make it a career. She loved the camera, but it didn’t seem possible to make a living with it in Pittsburgh. She’d taken enough pictures of her family to know that she didn’t have the patience for a lifetime of baby photos, high school senior pictures, or weddings. Sooner or later she would snap. The Pittsburgh television stations all required their camera operators to have a four-year degree in broadcasting, something that the University of Pittsburgh no longer offered.
Her family didn’t have the money to pay for an off-world school. Her grades were good but not good enough for a full scholarship to a college on Earth. With her skill in martial arts and with a rifle, she could have gone into the military. She couldn’t imagine the military ignoring her sharpshooting skills to let her pursue a career in photography. She had been afraid that she would get pressured to become a sniper like her father. It was a career that was useful only on the front line and had gotten her father killed.
Everything had changed when Boo vanished. Jane couldn’t leave Elfhome without feeling like she’d abandoned all hope for her baby sister. She couldn’t walk away from her little brothers, who had lost yet another family member. She couldn’t turn her back on her widowed mother, who had lost her baby.
The days following Boo’s disappearance in the Strip District during Shutdown, the Kryskills had become the big news story. The crews from all three television networks became intertwined with the Kryskills’ daily lives as the search for Boo dragged on and on. Because her brothers were minors, no one was allowed to interview them. Chloe Polanski turned public opinion against Jane’s mother, so the other networks focused on Jane.
It was probably the source of Jane’s uneasiness about being the center of attention. Certainly, it was the first time in her life that someone had turned a video camera on her. All the interviews, though, only made Jane aware of how badly she had failed at protecting her baby sister. She was only in the spotlight because she had screwed up. No one would be paying attention to Jane if she hadn’t lost her sister first.
Mark Webster had been WQED’s reporter; he’d been the one who suggested that Jane try for a job with his station. Later, Jane realized that he’d been flirting with her. He’d meant a temporary job at the front desk since the receptionist was going on maternity leave shortly, but by then Jane had filled out an application citing any camera experience that she could claim, including one Christmas working a Santa photo op booth. Nor was she completely sure what position WQED intended to interview her for — they gave her only a date and time.
She was sitting in the building’s lobby, waiting to be called back for her interview, when a drunk stumbled through the front door with a gun. Without thinking, she disarmed the gunman and pinned him to the floor. It wasn’t hard. He was a little man, reeking of whiskey and smelling like he’d slept in his rumbled clothes for at least two days in a row.
“Do you know who I am?” the drunk had cried as he squirmed helplessly.
“No,” Jane glanced at the very pregnant receptionist who was standing, staring openmouthed at her. “Call the police.”
“He — he works here,” the receptionist said as if she wasn’t sure which of them scared her more.
“I am Hal Rogers!” the drunk roared. “I’m the star of the Emmy-winning program Backyard Rehab! I–I—I think I’m going to be sick.”