It meant the birthday card would have been terrifyingly timely. How had the twins known what day she was born when she knew nothing about them?
The morning Tooloo had stolen her mail, Tinker had hiked down to her salvage yard, caught between annoyance and giggling madly. She had woken up insanely early from a weird and crazy dream. It started as a nightmare where she’d built a teleporting device that had gone haywire, spitting out duplicates of herself like something out of The Fly. Some of her copies were half-size. Some had black crow wings. Others were tiny as mice. She was hip-deep in weirdness before she’d gotten the machine turned off. In the dream she’d been frustrated that the copies had decided to throw a weird combination of birthday party and circus with everything from giant wingless birds to a large talking dog that spoke only in Japanese.
As if that wasn’t enough, the copies had decided to put up posters everywhere advertising that Tinker was still only seventeen and an orphan living alone. Shadowy men had taken notice and were coming with cages for the entire crazy mass. It was a stupid unsettling dream with bits of silliness that made her laugh all the while checking over her shoulder.
It had been a day designed to annoy her. April in Pittsburgh was normally a fragile, warm month as the city crept out of the hold of winter. The crab apple trees that hugged the river’s banks were all beginning to bloom, filling the air with their sweetness. This morning, though, had decided to turn bitter cold and damp. It wasn’t quite raining but dampness hung in the air like mist. To top it off, Tooloo had been at the mailbox of Pittsburgh Salvage, going through her mail.
“Tooloo!” Tinker shouted as she closed on the old half-elf.
The tall female was dressed in a threadbare fairy silk gown that came down to her ankles. The ragged hem showed off her worn red high-top sneakers. Her white hair was braided into a thick cord that hung down the middle of her back. Tooloo had her huge rooster, Box, hooked up to his little cart — that she was filling with Tinker’s mail.
“That’s mine!” Tinker tried to snatch a box out of the cart. Box pecked the back of her hand. “Ow! Tooloo! What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m keeping a certain little monkey from chasing its own tail.” Tooloo dropped a handful of packages and magazines into Box’s cart. “It only leads to trouble.”
“No! Stop that!” Tinker tried to grab a small Amazon box — probably the replacement motherboard she ordered — out of the wagon.
Box puffed up, readying himself for battle. He was a huge buff Orpington rooster, fifteen pounds of pure golden orange fury. She had seen him take on cats, dogs, foxes, and coyotes. He was a fearless and vicious warrior. He was, though, also fairly stupid — being a chicken and all.
Tinker had bought a loaf of raisin bread from the Jenny Lind bakery before Shutdown and then forgotten it. It was rock hard and possibly moldy (the raisins making it impossible to be sure). She’d brought it with her, thinking there was an off chance she would see Roach with his elfhounds. She pulled the loaf out, tore it into large chunks, and flung them onto the ground in front of Box. While the rooster was busy pecking at the bread, Tinker snatched up her packages.
“You can’t steal people’s mail!” Tinker said. “It’s against the law!”
“Pft! Moral obligations outweigh laws,” Tooloo said. “If you see a bomb in someone’s mailbox, you take it out.”
“Bomb? What bomb?” Tinker eyed the packages in her arms. She’d ordered a lot of odd things, some of which could be used for bomb making, but she hadn’t ordered anything explosive. At least, she was fairly sure she hadn’t. It had been a month or more since she ordered most of the items in the boxes.
“One can never be sure with off-world surprises. They arrive without warning to blow up in your face. That’s always been the problem.”
“There’s no bomb in my mail,” Tinker decided. “You just want some weird excuse to take it. If you need something, like packing material, just tell me.”
“You don’t explain a fire to a blind woman using colors. You just tell her that she’s going to get burned. The problem with monkeys is that they never listen. Give them to me.”
“Wait until I open them!” Tinker danced out of Tooloo’s reach. Thankfully the old elf didn’t follow. “I’ll bring them to you tonight.”
“Whatever.” Tooloo turned and walked away.
Box pecked up the last of the bread and strutted after Tooloo.
Tinker thought she had gotten everything off of Tooloo. Certainly everything she expected to find in her mail was there. She hadn’t been expecting a birthday card from her baby sisters, so she hadn’t realized that it was missing from her mailbox. Tooloo must have secreted it away while Tinker fought with Box. Tooloo had come armed to take everything but settled for the only “bomb” in Tinker’s mail.
Tinker stormed out of Lain’s house. She’d suffered a constant barrage of rough emotions since the tengu dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night. Fear of what the oni might do with the contents of Dufae’s box. Terror that she might have to act as parent to her twin sisters, who already outstripped her in insanely dangerous and impossible feats. Anger and jealousy toward Esme. Deep hurt that Lain hadn’t trusted her with the truth for so many years. After being tumbled through those many abrasive emotions all morning, Tinker had been polished down to pure rage.
Rainlily had caught up to them on Stormsong’s Delta, directed by Lemonseed as to where to find them. Tinker was too angry to ask how the female’s mission had gone. Pony and Stormsong had warned her that Windwolf wouldn’t be able to leave the battlefront. The fact that they were obviously right only fueled Tinker’s rage more. She caught flashes of blade talk as the sekasha filled one another in. She ignored it; Pony could tell her later about how useless Rainlily’s trip had been.
Tinker stomped to their big Rolls-Royce limo. Pony was the best driver of the five; he’d driven them to Lain’s. Tinker was too angry to be chauffeured; she got in behind the wheel. The sekasha gathered at her door, unhappy about her intended destination.
“If Tooloo is truly Vision,” Stormsong said quietly, “she will know that you are coming.”
“I don’t care.” Tinker held her hand out to Pony. The Rolls-Royce had been gifted to the elves near the turn of the century; it still used manual keys.
Stormsong pressed on even as Pony surrendered the keys. “If you think Lain and Esme are cruel and heartless for what they’ve done to you, know that they are just pale shadows of the ruthlessness that is Pure Radiance and Vision. I spent a hundred years begging my mother to tell me why she had me. Why a mixed caste? Why after thousands of years of being chaste, did she sleep with my father? Why him? Her answer had always been that if I could not envision the world that she was trying to create, then I was just a stumbling block for her to remove.”
Tinker paused in sliding the seat forward so she could reach the pedals. Pony might be the shortest and stockiest of the sekasha but he was still a foot taller than she. “Remove? Like kill you?”
It was telling that Stormsong had to consider the question for a moment. “I believe she would if she felt it was necessary. She is ruthless. She had a disagreement with Vision. She betrayed her own mother to the Skin Clan to make the world that we now live in. It was by her action that Vision was bound hand and foot in the first place.”
Tinker growled in frustration at the truth. Her grandfather could outthink her when she was a child with limited experience about how the world worked. He had a harder time as she got older. Lain and Tooloo, though, never had trouble keeping two steps ahead of her. “Well…your mother didn’t do a very good job if Vision got away.”