“Like I told you, Dart.” He pointed to Olivia. “They’re tiny even when they’re fully grown.”
Olivia was the tallest human woman in sight, but she was still a good eight to ten inches shorter than any of the female elves.
Dart waved off the proof. “The Wind Clan domi is smaller than this female.”
Olivia didn’t know the meaning of the word domi. Without a doubt, though, they were debating the maturity of the girl being hailed as Princess Tinker. The girl was two years older than Olivia but six inches shorter. Even with the war on, everyone was talking about Princess Tinker. Pittsburgh’s own little Cinderella. Pictures of her were being plastered all over the city. Olivia had been surprised at how small and scruffy-looking the girl was.
“Did you hear, Ash?” Dart said. “One-eyed thinks he can get a human female to be his domi since no elf will have him.”
Ash laughed. “He is insane. You heard this one.” He pointed at Olivia. “Humans live alone.”
Dart nodded. “I heard he’s been pawing all the nivasa at the Wind Clan enclave. Male and female alike. The holy ones won’t put up with that forever. Especially Thorne Scratch on Stone.”
Olivia was relieved that the conversation had shifted off her. She wished the marines would move away. Everyone around her was obviously made just as uncomfortable by the elves’ presence and their discussion. There was a five-foot gap on either side of her.
There was a call from down the street and the elves echoed it so it traveled up Penn Avenue.
The two elves glanced down Mentor Way. Olivia could hear Peanut’s muffled yelping. She’d spent weeks working as a streetwalker and yet the sounds of sex still made Olivia blush.
“Hoi! Blaze!” Ash called. “The handout is starting! Shoot your gun and get it out of that girl.”
Olivia lifted her newspaper and pretended to read even as Peanut’s moans grew louder. The elves laughed. Out the corner of her eye, she could see that Dart was pretending to be holding a girl by the hips and thrusting into her.
“He’s only a hundred this year,” Ash said. “I remember that age. Fucking anything on two legs that bent over for me.”
“I’d feel like I was taking a child,” Dart said. “That girl looked sixty or seventy.”
Ash laughed. “You idiot, humans are dead of old age at eighty. She’s probably…forty.” He’d missed Peanut’s real age by at least twenty years or more.
“Forty?” Dart frowned at the alley. “Good gods, that’s indecent.”
“She’s probably an adult, although it’s hard to tell with them. Blaze! Come on!”
There was a deep male groan and then silence from the alley. A minute later, the two came out from behind a dumpster. The male was trying to refasten his pants as Peanut towed him to Olivia’s side.
“I’m on the next street over,” Peanut was saying, pointing toward Liberty Avenue. “Come find me anytime.”
Peanut pulled him down and kissed him hard before letting him go.
Two consenting adults agreed to have fun together. No money was even exchanged. Still it seemed wrong for intelligent beings to be screwing in an alley like dogs. Olivia sighed, recognizing herself as a prude. A stupid trait to have considering that her survival depended on having sex with men in alleyways. Everything would be easier if she could just be more like Peanut.
Peanut laughed. “Go ahead and say it, Red.”
“I wish I could be more like you.”
“No, you don’t.” Peanut caught her hand and squeezed it. “You can forgive me, but you’d hate yourself. You’ve got grit, Red, and you’re proud of it.”
Lately it’s all she liked about herself.
“Besides, if we get a bunch of elves trolling Liberty Avenue, maybe girls will stop being killed.” Peanut winced at the surprise on Olivia’s face. “You did hear about Cotton Candy? Right?”
“No.” Olivia’s stomach did a sickening roll. In the last three weeks, six girls had been killed. The streetwalkers lived too close to the underbelly of the city where the oni were hiding. Only Roxy, buried in rubble when the dragon fight smashed through downtown, could have been any one of the sixty thousand humans in Pittsburgh. The other five girls were killed because they were whores working the streets, dealing with the city’s lowlifes. “What happened?”
Peanut spread her hand. “She was up by the train station. No one saw what happened exactly. She took a shotgun to the face. They think she leaned into a car, trying to come on to the driver. She must have seen something she shouldn’t have. He was an oni or something like that.”
Olivia’s stomach did another sickening roll. Ever since she’d lost her job at the bakery, she felt like she was slowly falling to her death. The irony was that she decided to come to Pittsburgh because it would be so hard to crawl back to her husband if things turned ugly. “I can’t keep on doing this. I need to get off the streets.”
Olivia had been afraid that they would be refused a share of the handout since their names weren’t on any database. She used “Red” to make it harder for police and EIA johns to check if she was a legal resident. Like most of the other streetwalkers, Peanut used her nickname for the same reason; she was the only girl willing to risk being arrested to stand in line with Olivia.
When they reached the front of the line, they discovered that the elves in Wind Clan blue were passing out the dried beans, not the EIA as they expected. The elves weren’t concerned with official citizenship—they were only checking for magically disguised oni. They’d already found one warrior hidden with the humans; it had been dragged to the other side of the street and beheaded. The stench of fresh blood in the late summer heat made Olivia’s stomach roil.
She fought the urge to throw up as the elves took a piece of paper with a spell written on it, pressed it to her arm, and activated it. After the magic confirmed she was as human as she looked, the elves stamped her hand bright red and weighed out her allotment of keva beans. The handout was ten pounds, measured out on scales. Olivia watched the beans spill into her canvas tote, knowing that the beans were really time. If she rationed herself to a cup a day, she could live off them for weeks. The problem was that when the beans ran out, there might not be food to buy in the stores. She needed money now to buy what little remained before war and winter could disrupt the food supplies from the coast. Much as she wanted to stop streetwalking immediately, she should keep the beans for an emergency supply.
“This is going to be the only handout?” she asked the Wind Clan elf that was doing the weighing.
“Yes. Beloved Tinker domi commanded that it be given out to keep people from panicking. The next shipment will be sold to wholesalers for resale.”
Which meant first come, first served, at whatever price the stores decided to set.
Wiley’s was a little mom-and-pop grocery store two blocks from her house. Olivia shopped there daily to spend all her money from the night before on what little food was left in the store. Wiley’s carried local produce and dairy, staying open while the Giant Eagle down the road had closed. Everything that was in cans and plastic containers—basically everything imported from Earth—was sold out.
A small, refrigerated case held fresh milk and eggs. There was also butter in little canning jars. It reminded her of the ranch. With thirty mouths to feed, every day meant a new jar of butter. She hated the reminder but it couldn’t be avoided. Butter wrapped in paper came from Earth. Wiley’s got their dairy from a little farm in the South Hills.