Tinker pressed on. “Why is it even up to me? You’ve had years and years. Centuries! Couldn’t you have stopped the Skin Clan before this?”
“You sound like my daughter,” Tooloo said. “Simple revenge, fast and bloody. It’s one thing to stop an object in motion. It’s quite another to change someone’s heart.”
“Whose heart are you trying to change?” Tinker asked.
Tooloo snorted. “You want a list? It’s quite long. You are on it. Things would be easier if you’d stayed hidden. But no, you plowed on through all the obstacles I put in your path. You gave yourself to my daughter and she made you into a baited trap. You have no idea how tiring it is to see something coming and no matter how hard you try, the ones you love best ignore your warnings. The only reason you escaped them that first time was because they didn’t know what they’d gotten hold of. They know now.”
“It would help if you actually explained things in a plain, straightforward way,” Tinker grumbled. “Something that didn’t involve chessboards and chickens and double-talk.”
“I have centuries of experience that say otherwise.” Tooloo waved away the complaint.
This was the Tooloo that Tinker expected to talk to.
Tinker looped back to her original attack plan. “I need the original digital copy of the Dufae Codex.”
Tooloo gave a tired laugh. “See? The world’s greatest oracle has told you that you don’t need it, but you persist instead of stopping and actually using that clever brain of yours.”
Tinker gritted her teeth against the urge to scream in frustration. “The Skin Clan has what Dufae — Unbounded Brilliance — stole from Iron Mace. They might use—”
“Oh, they will.” Tooloo closed her eyes. “Shortly. The clock is ticking. You’re wasting time.”
“Then give me the Codex!”
“I’ve seen what giving you the Codex now will do. You’ll waste time flipping pages and coming to conclusions already reached. Do you think that Unbounded Brilliance did nothing in France for all those years and years that he lived on Earth?”
“I think he found a solution!” Tinker shouted.
“Would he not have returned home if he had?” Tooloo asked calmly.
Tinker threw up her hands in frustration. “The gateways were closed behind him, cutting him off!”
“Would that stop you?” Tooloo asked. “Would you stay in place if you knew the answer to save your world?”
“No,” Tinker huffed, because the truth was a gut-punch. She eyed the chessboard. “How much time?”
Tooloo spread her hands. “You are not playing against me. There are others in the game. It could be as soon as an hour or as late as tomorrow. The less said, the better.”
Other intanyai seyosa who could see the future. Tinker eyed the chessboard. Stormsong had said that one of the twins shared her nuenae. Lain had said that Chloe was probably the result of the same type of mass fertilization of eggs that created the twins. How many sisters did Chloe have?
Tinker eyed the white pieces on the chessboard. Was Tooloo saying, in so many words, that at this moment the “monkeys” could be spying on this conversation? Tinker pulled out her tablet and took a picture of the board. If the substituted pieces were some kind of code, it was going to take a while for her to figure out. If she had time…
If she was going to fight her shadow again, she’d better start by hiding where she couldn’t be found until she had a game plan. Someplace where she had access to all sorts of things she could turn into unexpected weapons.
20: I AM A BEING CAPABLE OF DOING TERRIBLE THINGS. RUN
The shopping trip had been a mistake. Oilcan was beginning to realize that he’d committed a cascade of blunders. He probably should have waited until the domana were back in the city. He could have asked someone to buy the furniture for him; half of Team Tinker had been at Sacred Heart. He should have started small — just beds for the twins. He shouldn’t have brought all the kids. He should have left Once More With Feeling the moment he found out that the ancient manager was the only employee in the store. He felt like he was stuck in resin that was slowly turning to amber.
They’d been there for hours as he bought out full sections of the store. Seven beds. Seven mattresses. All the linens. (Cattail Reeds added “fabric” to her list when she saw what the store had in stock for sheets and blankets.) Four dining room tables and dozens of chairs. Two dress racks. Two student desks. Every lamp that they could find. Even with three trucks, it was going to take more than one trip to ferry everything back to Sacred Heart.
The manager moved frustratingly slow. He wanted to tag their purchases as “sold,” do math by hand, twice, then fill out stock inventory sheets. The last step Oilcan was certain should have been done at the end of the day when customers weren’t standing and waiting. Bored, the kids investigated other parts of the store and started to bring him impulse buys. A garden gnome statue. An old leather suitcase. A singing fish. A giant German beer stein. A Raggedy Ann doll. A picture of Jeff Goldbloom in a delicate metal rose frame. (The last mystified Oilcan as he wasn’t sure if Cattail realized that the photograph could be swapped out of the beautiful frame.)
Oilcan didn’t mind the kids buying the random odd things except he wanted to be done with the “buying” and move on to “loading.” Each new purchase jumped the process backward as the manager would stop everything to find the “sold” tags. It was already well past noon and they were going to need to make two round trips to get all the furniture to Sacred Heart. Everything would need to be loaded and unloaded and dragged up three flights of stairs. It was quite possible that after going through the grueling process once, Andy, Guy, Rebecca, and possibly Blue Sky would bail. Postponing the second load might be a wise decision but it meant picking what went on the first load became all important. He wanted to make sure each of his kids got something today that they truly wanted.
“Can we start loading the big pieces?” Oilcan asked. It would keep the kids from finding new things.
The manager shook his head. “I need to supervise loading to make sure you only take what you’re paying for. Store policy. That’s why we normally have employees load up purchases.”
Oilcan realized that he was clenching his hands into fists out of frustration.
“We could go get ice cream,” Blue Sky said.
There were cheers and more than one “I’m hungry” made Oilcan realize that they’d missed lunch.
“You will be back?” the old man said in a voice full of suspicion.
“Yes.” Oilcan peeled off bills from his roll of cash to cover all that the manager had totaled up so far. It was an alarming amount but Tinker had promised to cover his expenses for a year. “You could hold onto this as good-faith money.”
The manager sighed deeply. “I’ll get you a receipt.”
As Oilcan crossed East Carson Street, there was a distant boom of an explosion, muffled by the hills and trees to the point that it became a barely audible thud. He paused on the opposite sidewalk to scan the horizon. A flock of birds rose from the far bank of the Monongahela River, startled by the explosion. A thick plume of black smoke went up against the gray blanket of clouds that covered the sky. It looked miles away, visible only because the explosion occurred on a hilltop.
“What do you think it is?” Oilcan asked Rebecca and Guy, who were pointing at the dark smoke and discussing it in whispers.
“I think it’s a black willow,” the tengu girl said. “There was a report of several trees moving toward Oakland. Don’t worry; the tengu are dealing with the situation. They must have dropped some kind of explosive on it.”