“Which should terrify you at the thought of going against Vision,” Stormsong said.
Tinker doubted that Tooloo would kill her. The female had been her babysitter; that had to count for something. Tinker wasn’t sure, though, that her Hand was safe from the old elf. Tinker frowned at the warriors who were patiently waiting for her to give orders. All five would willingly die to keep her safe. During the summer, she had come close to killing them several times over. They would go wherever she led; she had to be sure that she didn’t lead them into danger. Or at least…unnecessary danger.
Tinker had to assume that Tooloo was as clever and dangerous as Chloe. Tinker had trapped Chloe by doing abstruse things, like designing traps using both little known science and magic. Tinker didn’t want to kill Tooloo. Trapping her would be pointless. Tinker imagined that Tooloo would sit calmly in the trap, give her a slow clap, and then ask, “Now what, little monkey?”
Now what indeed?
Tinker handed the keys back to Pony and climbed over the center console to the back. She needed to think about this.
At one time, Tinker’s whole world had been the narrow five-mile-long island in the middle of the Ohio River. She and her grandfather had claimed most of Neville Island for themselves, living in huge empty hotel at the edge of the rusting hulks of industry. Pittsburgh’s steel-town legacy had started to crumble after the Second World War, but the deathblow had been the city being kidnapped to Elfhome. The only company on Neville Island that survived the first Startup had burned to the ground a few years later.
Downtown had been a place that the adults talked about. Tinker could see the tips of its skyscrapers over the trees that grew thick along the river’s edge. Since she and her grandfather never visited the city proper, Downtown seemed like a far-off fantasy castle. They left the island for only two exceptions: every few days, without rhyme or reason, her grandfather would take Tinker to Lain’s on Observatory Hill or across the river to Tooloo’s store in McKees Rocks.
At least, it seemed without logic to Tinker as a child. Lain felt like a random stranger that her grandfather didn’t particularly like but decided to entrust his granddaughter with. He referred to Lain as “that woman,” especially when Lain tried to influence how he was raising Tinker. The two fought over her education, diet, hygiene, and safety. More than once Lain had shown up at Neville Island during the spring floods to drag Tinker off to high ground as if it was her God-given right to kidnap small children out of their beds. Tinker thought that her grandfather only grudgingly permitted Lain’s attitude because Lain had been an astronaut, one of the few scientists on Observatory Hill who had actually been in space, and a force of nature when opposed.
It was all so clear now that her grandfather allowed it because Lain was her aunt.
But if Lain wasn’t an arbitrary stranger, then who was Tooloo?
Her grandfather didn’t trust strangers or elves, but he’d trusted Tooloo.
Oilcan had arrived on Elfhome knowing Elvish. He spoke High Elvish better than Tinker. He’d learned it from his mother, who had learned it from her great-aunt Josephina Dufae. Tinker never wondered how her great-great-aunt knew Elvish; she accepted it as one of the universal truths, like the Earth circling a different sun from the one she normally saw in the sky. Unbounded Brilliance, though, had died while his son was an infant. Etienne Dufae and his children might have had access to the Dufae Codex but that wouldn’t have taught them how to speak Elvish.
Had Tooloo been watching over the Dufae children for generations?
If she had been, it would explain so much. Why would Unbounded Brilliance break into his uncle’s private lockbox? How did infant Etienne get safely to Boston after Unbounded Brilliance had been swept up in the French Revolution? Why had her grandfather been living in Pittsburgh in the days prior to the city being kidnapped to Elfhome? How did Esme find out about Leonardo’s stored sperm and arrange for Tinker to be born?
Tooloo.
Vision.
Whoever she was.
The twins had warned the tengu about the Dufae box. It meant that the twins probably had an unedited copy of the Dufae Codex. Tooloo had given Esme a digital version of the journal to pass on to her children, most likely because she had foreseen that the twins would need magic to escape to Elfhome.
But Tooloo hadn’t given it to Tinker. She had let Tinker work with the highly edited version, fully knowing that Tinker was heading into a perfect storm of oni and elves.
How did Tinker get her to cough it up now?
Tinker sat in the back of the Rolls-Royce, blowing raspberries, as she came up with nothing.
The problem was that for Tinker’s entire life, Tooloo had defied all logic. The old elf almost never answered a direct question; when she did, she often refuted it within minutes. How old was she? Who were her parents? When was her birthday? Tooloo had given dozens of conflicting answers.
To be fair, some of the questions might have been impossible to answer. Vision had been created out of dragon DNA. Were Tooloo’s “parents” elves or dragons? Genetically she was both and neither. She’d been born a slave; her birthday probably hadn’t been celebrated with a frosted cake and lit candles. Even if Tooloo somehow knew the exact day, over the last few thousand years, humans had changed their calendar multiple times. September was no longer the seventh month. At one point, ten days were simply dropped from the calendar. Every four years, they added an extra day. How could anyone keep track?
The truth was, though, that Tooloo refused to be known. Even with something as simple as her favorite color, the female had answered with the entire spectrum of the rainbow, starting with red and ending with violet. Tinker used it to her advantage when she was little, discovering that a barrage of personal questions was the fastest way to trigger a magic lesson. Tinker knew that she was being derailed from learning anything about the old elf. Tooloo knew that Tinker knew. Had Tooloo ignored the personal questions simply to cut to what Tinker truly wanted in the first place?
Tinker had the unedited paper copy of the Dufae Codex. It would take days for her to plow through it alone. She could cut it up, give the pages to all the elves at Poppymeadows, and have them find every reference to the box. She really hated the idea of tearing apart the two-hundred-year-old family heirloom, especially knowing now that she and Oilcan only had a portion of it saved to computer memory.
She could look into how her grandfather managed to create the digital copy that he gave her; maybe one of his old computers had the unedited version on it. None of his machines, though, had been in the storage unit where she found the paper copy. Oilcan might have left the ancient computers at the now-leveled hotel. She couldn’t remember seeing them there either but she had been focused on getting her own machines up and running. She could call and ask Oilcan where the machines went, but that felt like a waste of time. Even if she could get the ancient machines to boot up, she would then have to hack past her grandfather’s security and dig through a mountain of purposely confusing file names. (She was never sure if her grandfather’s levels of encryptions were because of his paranoia of strangers or because of her curiosity.)
Maybe the tengu could finagle a copy from the twins. Actually, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would be faster and less painful than dealing with Tooloo.
Pony, she realized, was pulling into the parking space beside Tooloo’s seedy storefront.
Bread, Butter, Eggs, Fish, Fowl, Honey, Pittsburgh Internet Access, Milk, Spellcasting, Telephone, Translations, Video Rentals was written under the glass block windows in English and Elvish. Tinker had painted the words and runes there herself when she was eight. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that the advertising would pull in every spectrum of people within Pittsburgh. The locals wanting food and help with magic. The human newcomers who needed a public telephone and internet access. Elves who didn’t speak English. Was there ever a better information-gathering nest for a spider to sit in?