Tommy grunted. “I was down in this area a couple of times after Tinker first invented the hoverbikes. It was a complete no-man’s-land. Her team had the run of the island. Tinker had set up jumps and such to make an insane course where one missed jump landed you in the river. Everyone was more than happy to move to my racetrack when I set it up. A few days ago, we had a fight with the oni and Iron Mace at the hotel where Oilcan used to live. Oilcan killed Iron Mace at the dam.” Tommy pointed to a line drawn across the main channel of the Ohio River about a mile from the notch. “After the fighting, I was trying to stay out of the elves’ way.” He drifted his finger toward the notch. “I noticed that something was going on here. There were buildings that looked new but what really stood out was the big electric chain link fence all around it and prison-level guard detail. The Wyverns checked to see if the people were humans or oni. There was no mass beheading, so I’m assuming that they were happy with whatever they found.”
A high-security human business site. It sounded like the perfect place to hold whores prisoner.
“We should go to the hotel,” Olivia said. “There was activity there recently. If we’re spotted, then they probably will assume that we’re there because of something that happened during the fight. From there, we can make an attack plan.”
Tommy gave her a surprised look but nodded. “That sounds smart.”
Neville Island looked like something out of a postapocalypse film. Industrial buildings crumbling with disrepair. Weed-choked parking lots. Rusting vehicles with flat tires. Random trash everywhere. A chair. A desk. A filing cabinet. It was like someone put them on the street to take and then abandoned them. Scattered here and there were also remnants of a hoverbike race course. Near the bridge where Joyboy’s body had been found was a large berm turn of packed dirt along with homemade arrows outlining the lip. Anyone who overshot the turn would end up in the river. Part of the sidewalk along the road had dirt jump rhythm section. Beside the driveway to the collapsed hotel was a high tabletop jump. Knowing that Tinker had been thirteen when she invented the hoverbike, the race course construction was even more impressive. It would have required dump trucks full of dirt from someplace, dug up by backhoes and packed down with bulldozers.
It was telling, too, that Tommy had managed to replicate it someplace else and had lured the racing circuit out to it. The man had mad people skills despite his barn cat ways.
The battle at Tinker’s childhood home had leveled the abandoned hotel. It made an impressive mound of debris. There was some yellow tape, fluttering in the wind, put in place by the police or the EIA. Judging by the fresh footprints in the mud, the tape failed to keep the curious from picking through the rubble.
Olivia pulled the cargo truck into the hotel’s driveway, running over the tape. Parking and pocketing the keys to the truck, she pulled the binocular case out of her purse, once again glad that she had thought to steal them from her husband. She looped their strap over her head as she waved the marines out of the truck.
“Secure the immediate area,” she said.
Once the marines were fanning out, Olivia scrambled up onto the tabletop jump to scan the area with her binoculars. The area was as flat as one expected for an island in the middle of a large river that flooded often. It had probably started life as a sandbar in some prehistoric time. While the tabletop gave her a vantage point, there were still dozens of warehouse buildings blocking her view of the entire island.
Gaddy muscled her hoverbike up the steep slope to stop beside Olivia.
“Where is the shipyard?” Olivia asked.
“We’re facing west on Neville Road.” Gaddy indicated the street beside them. She pointed out a dam with two locks along the far riverbank. “To the north, that’s the Emsworth Locks and Dam on the main channel of the Ohio. That’s where Oilcan fought with Iron Mace.” She pointed south to the other side of the island. “Okay, follow Neville Road west and you’ll see that there’s a second dam on the Ohio’s back branch. It’s smaller and it doesn’t have any locks.”
Olivia found it. The road seemed to come within fifty feet of the southern bank at that spot. “I see it.”
“Right there, a second street splits away from Neville Road, goes north, and turns to run parallel to it. That’s Grand Avenue, which always seemed to me to be too fancy a name for such an industrial area. The shipyard is off of Grand Avenue, along the northern bank. Tommy is right; there’s a big new building there, right where the shipyard should be.”
Olivia found the massive steel building, longer than a football field. It was difficult to tell how tall it was as there were no windows to mark off floors. It seemed three or four stories high. A gold crown and the word “Midas” had been painted onto the side of the building.
“I always thought you built a ship outside,” she murmured. “Not indoors.”
Perhaps the shipbuilding was a cover story for something else. There seemed to be smaller buildings beyond the big one but it was hard to tell from their angle. A tall chain-link fence surrounded the buildings.
Tommy popped his hoverbike up to land beside her. Aiofe stayed with the marines, still peppering them with anthropology questions about the Fire Clan in general. Olivia really had to admire the girl for her diligence.
“What is your plan?” Tommy said. “Storm in? Guns blazing?”
Olivia shook her head. By his tone, it sounded like he’d leave if she came up with that sketchy of a plan. The Ranch had police raid drills based on the assumption that the children would be seen as helpless pawns, not well-trained soldiers. She wasn’t sure who had the flawed worldview — the police or the elders. Working backward, it was fairly easy to tell a standard hostage rescue mission required a distraction.
They had too little information, though. They were assuming that the shipyard had been the kidnappers’ destination. That Knickknack and the others had been kept together. That they were still alive and hadn’t done anything stupid and the violence hadn’t escalated after the men moved their hostages. Olivia didn’t want to blindly charge in to discover that there was no one to save. She didn’t want to risk the marines for nothing.
How could they get more information?
“Why don’t the two of you do a lap on the racetrack? Make it seem like you’re just two kids, messing around, but see if you can spot anything that can tell us exactly who is at the shipyard?”
Gaddy laughed. “Yeah, sure, I’ll race against a Delta but I’m not going to win.”
19: SIGNED, SEALED, AND DELIVERED
Tinker vividly remembered the day that Tooloo stole her mail. It was in April. It was a few days before she turned eighteen and no longer had to be afraid of being deported as an underaged orphan. It was roughly eight weeks before she saved Windwolf’s life or met Pony. It was three months before she knew about the oni army hidden in and around the city.
Pittsburgh used to travel back and forth between Elfhome and Earth. While Pittsburgh was on Elfhome, all the mail on Earth addressed to the city was collected in a warehouse in Cranberry just on the other side of the Rim. The massive collection of letters and packages was shuffled across the border during Shutdown. Home delivery within Pittsburgh was suspended for forty-eight hours while the post office workers sorted through the monthly flood of mail. Two days after Startup, the mail carriers would stuff her mailbox with magazines, catalogs, junk mail, and a variety of small boxes that represented items impossible to find in Pittsburgh ordered over the internet during the last Shutdown. Thus she knew exactly what day it was when she caught Tooloo cleaning out her mailbox. April 25, six days before her eighteenth birthday.