“Oh, no, ladybug,” Lain said. “We drifted apart long before you came into the picture. I–I don’t know why. We were close when the boys were little but afterward things started to change.”
“They’re the ones that started it,” Esme said. “Refusing to return phone calls or emails. I drove halfway across the country once to see Tristan before I left Earth. I wanted to say goodbye to him properly. He locked himself in the bathroom and cried until I left. I couldn’t even get within spitting distance of Lucien; I’m not sure he was even living at the address that Mother gave me.”
Tinker shook her head. “I’m still not seeing how Chloe fits into this.”
“Our mother and Desmarais were trying to have another child when the boys were both diagnosed with a genetic disorder,” Lain said. “The plan was to use a surrogate to carry the baby to term instead of Mother. They’d already collected and fertilized the egg. Desmarais had paid a woman to act as the surrogate. Everything was set to go when Mother found out why the boys weren’t thriving. She assumed all her children with Desmarais would be afflicted with the same genetic disorder. He seemed to agree. Chloe was the right age, though, to be a result of that experiment. We think that Desmarais implanted the egg into a surrogate and never told our mother.”
“That’s…that’s horrible!” Tinker said.
“Desmarais is a monster. He’s why I’ve never told you that I was your aunt. Why I never told you about our family. He sees people — his own children — as tools to be used. He’ll kill to obtain what he wants. There’s no way I could protect you from him if the wrong person found out the truth.”
Jin had said that the twins had ended up in the custody of Esme’s mother after their parents had been killed. Had Desmarais arranged another murder? Was that where the four other babies came from? Did Desmarais search out the frozen embryos after stumbling across the twins and had them implanted into a surrogate mother?
“How many frozen embryos did you leave in New York?” Tinker said.
“Me?” Esme said. “We’re talking about Desmarais.”
“More than six?” Tinker pointed at the mouse cookies. “Because there are six of your children at Haven. The tengu found them wandering out in the woods while I was out playing hide-and-seek with Chloe.”
Esme stood up, hands over her mouth, eyes full of horror.
“Esme?” Lain said.
Esme muffled cries of dismay.
“Esme, what did you do?” Lain said.
Esme whimpered. “There was only supposed to be one! There was only supposed to be you! The one old enough to be able to save Pittsburgh. I’ve been dreaming of them. They’re so little. So helpless. Just little mice of children.”
“Six?” Lain had backtracked through the conversation to lock onto the most important detail. “Six?”
“Six,” Tinker said. “Two nine-year-olds and four newborns — or something like that.” She must have been very mentally off-balance not to get clarification on that. Was there one woman or four women pregnant with Dufae babies? Had Jin Wong been as rattled as she or was there a reason he didn’t clarify? The summer had been so full of weirdness that it boggled her as to why Jin might have dodged the question. It was a fairly innocuous question — wasn’t it? It might be something simple like two pregnant women carrying one to three babies each and thus it was just easier to skip to the punch line and say four babies. It was unsettling, though, that Jin hadn’t given a fully accurate body count.
“My mother claimed that seeing across universes was nearly impossible,” Stormsong said. “She likened each world to resting in a separate ocean with only tiny streams connecting them. To know how events were unfolding in a world, one must be in that ocean. Not even she could foresee these children until they traveled here.”
“But she’s aware of them now?” Lain asked.
“Most likely. The intanyai seyosa caste has their differences. Battles between them are like poker games where the cards are people. When I saw your little sister at the museum, I felt the resonance of another dreamer who shared my nuenae. If she was strong enough for me to sense her on Earth, my mother knows that she’s here in Pittsburgh.”
Her little sisters just got more terrifying. They had precognition on top of everything else? Tinker could remember being that age — she was always so sure that she was right about everything. If Tinker had been aware of her limited precognitive abilities, she would have been worse. Much worse.
Chloe had been after Oilcan’s kids because they had special powers. Tinker’s little sisters had power in spades. The only real advantage the twins had was that the oni didn’t know that they existed. Or did they? Chloe was working for the oni.
“The twins reached Haven while I was playing hide-and-seek with Chloe. It means they got to Elfhome while Chloe was alive. Do you think that Chloe knew about the twins?”
Stormsong shook her head. “Chloe could dodge my sword but she was not at my mother’s level. If she was, she would have known you were Esme’s daughter long before that conversation at the morgue.”
That was comforting. Tinker turned back to Esme. “Did you store more than six embryos?”
Esme shook her head. “I–I-I don’t think so. The doctors retrieved a little more than a dozen eggs. One or two failed to be fertilized. We implanted three into your surrogate mother, just to be sure at least one took. I had dreams about twins, so I thought two of them would take. I’m fairly sure that they told me there were six embryos left over and all were of high enough quality to freeze. I left them in case the ones implanted in your surrogate mother failed to produce a genius.”
Tinker shivered. Six babies all like her sitting in cold storage for years, quietly forgotten.
Well — not completely forgotten — or they wouldn’t be up to their ears in Dufae babies.
“I think the twins have a copy of the Dufae Codex,” Tinker said. “How would they have gotten it? Did Grandpa give you a digital copy? Was it a complete copy or doctored, like the one I have?”
“He didn’t give me anything,” Esme said. “Tooloo gave me a memory stick with some old photos of the Dufae family, a family tree, and a large text file. I barely looked at it; I didn’t have time. I think I put some pictures in with the stick; I got blazing drunk that night. I gave it to your surrogate mother to pass on — I think. That last part is fairly hazy.”
“Tooloo?” Tinker said. “How the hell did Tooloo get old Dufae family pictures?”
Esme shrugged. “I got the impression that she had always been your family’s nanny. At least, that’s what she made it sound like. She said something about taking a baby from France to Boston back during the French Revolution.”
“What?” Tinker shouted. “Are you sure?”
“This was only a few months ago for me,” Esme reminded Tinker.
“How — how — how?” Tinker sputtered with too many questions to pick just one. Tooloo always called Tinker and Oilcan “her” wood sprites. Was it because the old crazy half-elf had something more to do with their existence than being an occasional babysitter?
“I’ve always had dreams that came true,” Esme said. “On Earth, without magic, they were like getting one peek into a box. One quick flash of what was to come and then the image is gone. The summer I came to visit Lain here on Elfhome, I suddenly could take the lid off the box and stare at everything inside. But what was inside were horrible, terrible things. I didn’t know how to stop it from happening — what I needed to do to make things right. I didn’t even know if I could change the future. There’s this old technique that some famous scientist used: right before he went to bed, he thought about his problem and then he dreamed the answer.”