“Oh.” She whimpered at the memory.
“What is it?” Nikola tried to climb up the smooth side of the cardboard box and failed.
Louise blinked away the sudden tears. She didn’t have time to break down and cry. She steeled herself to lift out the carts. “I found your mini-bikes. They need to be recharged before you can race.”
Chuck parkoured across the luggage mules to land on the edge of the box. “Oh, it’s Tesla. We should fix it.”
“Yeah!” Nikola said. “It was useful to have a big body now and then.”
“The mice are more fun!” Green Jawbreaker called. “Tesla was so crowded when we were all in it.”
Her brother and sisters were not the bodies that she’d grown used to seeing them in, Louise reminded herself. They were four large eggs far above her head — from which God knew what would hatch out. Tesla was a broken machine; he was not Nikola.
“We don’t have time to fix Tesla,” Louise said. “We’re working on a big, big problem. Besides, we don’t have any spare parts for him.”
“Can’t we just print them?” Chuck said.
Louise glanced to Jillian, who shook her head. “Our printers aren’t sophisticated enough. We would need something heavy duty like the ones at Perlman. We could barely do the prototype of the mice on ours. We don’t have time to look for one.”
“I wonder if we can find a printer in Pittsburgh that can do it,” Green continued as if she hadn’t heard Louise. It was hard to tell. She could be just ignoring Louise; the babies were good at ignoring things that they didn’t like or understand.
“I’ll look!” Red Jawbreaker cried. “Me! Me! I can do it!”
“Be careful!” Louise said instead of “No, don’t” because the babies were bored and frustrated and probably scared. Looking for big 3D printers that they could “borrow” was probably safer than doing something like trying to track down oni and evil elves.
“We’ll be like ghosts!” the girls cried. Their robot mice bodies fell silent and still.
“I’ll stay with you.” Nikola climbed up onto her shoulder.
“How are you even controlling the mice?” Louise asked. “When you were in Tesla, it made sense — kind of — because he had a Wi-Fi connection that you could use to link with the robotic mice bodies.”
“I’m not sure.” Nikola cocked his head. “That’s a good question. We were bored. We could hear you talking about our names and the others were really annoyed with you. After you went to sleep, we decided to go talk to Orville. When we came back to Haven, someone had set up an internet connection. Over the last few hours, people have been sending hundreds of emails, coming and going. We skimmed the emails but they were boring. People we didn’t know going off to places we can’t get to. I’ll connect your tablet.”
The tengu were terrified at what the nactka could mean to their future. Jin Wong must have reversed his decision to keep Haven on a blackout in hopes that the improved communication would help in the war effort.
Louise hooked up the mini-hovercarts so that they would recharge and went back to her tablet. Nikola had logged her into a local network named Oneiroi. Being that the Oneiroi were the Greek personification of dreams, it might be a network that the tengu set up for Gracie. Louise resisted the urge to check on all of her favorite Pittsburgh sites that had been available to the twins only during Shutdown. She did stop the Imagine Dragons songlist that Red Jawbreaker had left playing and found the streaming signal from her favorite underground fusion radio station, WESA. “Sky Diving” was finishing up.
“Nicadae Pitsubaug!” the deejay shouted in pidgin Elvish and then switched over to English. “This is WESA and I’m Marti Wulfow, bringing you the best of new elf fusion music. A big shout-out to our sponsor, the Wool Shed, for all your knitting needs. The Wool Shed is a co-op of shepherds both here in Pittsburgh and in the Easternlands. It features indi, merino, and mohair wool. They have dyed yarn skeins and bulk carded wool. I’ve started my wool socks — it’s going to be a cold one this winter! And it’s… I want to say a beautiful day here in Pittsburgh but I can see storm clouds rolling in. We could be in for all sorts of nasty weather out there, so take precautions: take your umbrellas if you’re going out just in case! This is Naekanain with their new hit single, ‘We Are Pittsburgh’!”
A song she’d never heard before started playing. Naekanain’s lead singer was Carl Moser, who had a rough growling voice. “Blood on the pavement, blood on the blade, blood flows through common veins.”
It was odd knowing that musicians she’d spent a third of her life idolizing were suddenly a few miles south instead of in another universe, some impossible distance away. That she was going to meet the very people she used to make videos of using Barbie doll stand-ins. Windwolf. Wraith Arrow. Stormsong. Stormhorse. Maybe even Queen Soulful Ember. It made her feel a little giddy, mixed with something that could have been fear. All the kids at Perlman knowing about the Lemon-Lime videos had been a surprising revelation with weird, unexpected side effects. Surely the elves had never seen the videos. Hopefully. She wasn’t sure if Queen Soulful Ember had a forgiving side. The queen they portrayed in their videos didn’t. What if Louise’s “future-seeing” ability had picked that up? What a terrifying thought. She pushed the thought from her mind and focused on the problem at hand.
Red Jawbreaker was the first to report back, but she hadn’t found a printer. She hadn’t even looked for a printer. Instead she had gone to raid the underground elf fusion rock radio station for information. “It’s totally old school! They have an actual radio tower and everything. Marti Wulfow is awesome. She’s part of the Resistance! That whole bit about the storm and the umbrella? That was code! She has a long list of words you don’t say often that mean other things. Listen! Listen!”
“This is WESA and I’m Marti Wulfow, bringing you the best of new elf fusion music. It’s the top of the hour weather report! We’re looking at a huge storm blowing in, people! I hope you have your umbrellas with you. It’s going to be raining cats and dogs, cows and zebras! And now here is ‘First Hand,’ written by our very own Orphan for our very own Tinker domi!”
“Did you hear?” Red cried with triumph. “‘Umbrella’ means combat weapons. ‘Zebras’ means all primary scouts should report to their cell leaders.”
“What?” Louise shouted as Marti Wulfow started to play yet another Naekanain song that she hadn’t heard before.
Red continued as if she hadn’t heard the question. “If you meet someone and want to know if they’re in the Resistance, you say, ‘We are Pittsburgh’ and they say, ‘We are Team Tinker.’ Isn’t that cool? Oh, oh, oh and get this! Oilcan is Orphan. He wrote the song Marti is playing now and ‘Sky Diving’ and a lot of other songs that we like!”
“Really?” Nikola locked onto the least important part of Red’s report.
“It’s a secret but Marti is friends with both Oilcan and Carl Moser. I found an email where Marti was asking Carl if becoming an elf was going to stop Oilcan from writing songs as Orphan and Carl didn’t think so because Tinker is still the same girl that he’s always known.”
“Wait, wait, wait — Orville is an elf now?” Jillian cried.
“Please, try to keep up,” Red said.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you about that,” Louise said. “Dufae’s father, Forge, is here in Pittsburgh and he made Oilcan an elf. It seems very messy, like Oilcan didn’t ask to be an elf or something. I don’t know the whole story but…we might have to live with Forge and it doesn’t make Tinker happy.”
“And?” Jillian shouted.