Said male cousins were nowhere to be seen. Whatever went wrong and made the Chang family pull out of the festival, Trixie had set herself up as the only target.
“Are you okay?” Law whispered.
“We’re fine.”
“Are you sure? I could help you, if you just tell me…”
“Oh, stop!” Trixie kissed Law to silence her. She tasted of cigarettes and beer. With one kiss, they were back to thirteen, when Trixie had been Law’s first everything. First crush. First kiss. First sexual fumbling on warm summer nights. First lost love. When Law wouldn’t stop asking questions, Trixie enacted a silent treatment that made rocks seem talkative. They didn’t break up so much as Law fled the silence.
If Law kept asking now, she risked the fragile friendship they’d built since then.
Law took a deep breath and plunged ahead. Silence was a small price if it kept Trixie from being killed. “Don’t brush me off; I’m not thirteen anymore. I understand the danger now. I’m not going to go blindly charging into trouble. I can’t help you, though, if you don’t tell me the truth.”
Trixie snorted in disbelief but didn’t push her away. “There’s nothing you can do. Tommy took Spot and went after Jewel Tear. He told the rest of us to lay low, but we’re out of money and food. This is our one chance to get money before everything blows up in our face.”
“Tommy knows where the oni took Jewel Tear?”
“No!” Trixie cried in frustration. She glanced at the girls washing the apples and whispered. “He’s shooting blind. The timing was really wonky, so he thinks that the oni still have moles working the railroad. The inbound trains are all loaded down with royal marines. The outbound, though, are empty except for the crews. It’s three hundred miles to the East Coast. The oni could stop the train anywhere between here and there and no one would know.”
Someone would know.
Tommy was right. The oni would need to have moles still in place to keep anyone from finding out.
At one time, Pittsburgh had been a mishmash of rail lines. There had been the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Wabash, the Pennsylvania, the Erie Lackawanna, and probably a half-dozen others that Law had forgotten. At the time of the first Startup, the city had been a maze of active and rusty, abandoned tracks. While the humans on Earth focused on creating a massive quarantine zone around the metropolitan area, the people of Pittsburgh worked at consolidating the tracks into one railroad system that stretched out to the East Coast.
The hardest part of building a railroad wasn’t laying track, it was creating a solid level track bed with a subgrade layer blanketed by ballast. Through the heart of seven mountains and across countless streams and rivers, the engineers were forced to lay only one track. Every place they could, however, they built sidings where a slower train could sit and allow a faster train traveling the opposite direction to pass.
Most people in Pittsburgh believed that there was only one train in motion at any given time: inbound or outbound. There were, however, always multiple trains incoming and outgoing. A fast-moving set of passenger cars might pass as many as five slower freight trains during its eight-hour trip. It was a little-known fact because the only humans ever to ride on the trains were the crews.
Communication was key when juggling freight trains carrying up to fifteen thousand tons of ore. The individual cars were carefully tracked from being loaded on the East Coast until they were handed off to Earth during Shutdown.
The tracking was done on the upper floors of the Union Station on Liberty Avenue. The building was a beautiful terra-cotta brick with turn-of-the-century charm. Downstairs was complete with a stunning rotunda built to allow horse carriages to unload out of the rain and snow. Ironically with Pittsburgh on Elfhome, the shelter had returned to its original purpose. Big cargo wagons pulled by large draft horses sat under the rotunda. Royal marines were loading tents and personal gear onto the wagons. The Fire Clan soldiers were fresh off the latest passenger train; they shouted in excitement when they spotted Law.
“It’s a human! Look! A human!”
The marines crowded around Law.
“Maybe she’s a human, maybe she’s not,” one tall male said. “Oni can disguise themselves so they look like humans. We should test her.”
None of the marines seemed to notice Bare Snow skirting the edge of the rotunda. Law tracked her by the flash of blue in amongst the sea of red.
“Okay. Test me.” Law put out her arm. She’d been tested earlier in the summer. The attack on the viceroy made the elves aware of the oni presence. As a food supplier to the enclaves, Law went to the top of the list of “humans we want to be sure are not oni.” The humans running the train and those employed by the EIA were close seconds. All the moles should have been ferreted out; unless the moles looked human.
Several of the marines pulled out a spell inked onto a paper. There was a brief argument as to which paper would be used. For a while, it seemed like all of the spells might be applied. It was finally settled by a furious game of rock-paper-scissors. (Although, judging by the shouts, in the elf game “scissors” had been replaced by “flame.”)
The activated spell caused a ripple that felt like static electricity to crawl over Law, spreading out from her forearm to shoulder to scalp and then down her back. Every hair on her body stood on end. Nothing else happened.
There was visible disappointment on the marines’ faces when Law’s appearance didn’t change.
“Maybe it didn’t work.” The marine that lost the rock-paper-flame game held out his unused spell. “Maybe we should try again.”
“No!” the rest cried out in a chorus.
An officer shouted from the front of the wagon. “Stop talking with the native and get that wagon loaded, you lazy slackers!”
Native? It was the first time Law had been called that. She had been born on Elfhome, although if asked she would have said she was born in Pittsburgh.
The marines loaded the last of the tents onto the wagon. The driver flicked the reins to start the big horses. They trotted out of the rotunda with the clatter of metal horseshoes on stone paving.
“Move out!” the officer shouted.
The marine still holding the unused spell paper tried to stuff it away. The paper refused to cooperate. He finally thrust it at Law. “Here! For being patient.”
Free is free. Law bowed. “Thank you.”
The control room was a large, mind-boggling place. The longest wall was covered entirely by giant monitors showing the crazy spiderweb of tracks in Pittsburgh. Much of the tangle was the large freight yard at the foot of West End Bridge. From there were the dozens of dispersal lines that only led to Earth during Shutdown. A single thread leapt out across the room to a small web on the East Coast. Gleaming LED lights indicated train locations. Flickering indicated trains in motion. A vast amount of the network was dark, dormant, waiting on a miracle that would reconnect Pittsburgh to Earth.
A dozen workstations were positioned so they could see the wall in a single glance. Each had yet more screens, more buttons than God, and several computer keyboards. Law had been told countless stories about the room and how the controls had been greatly simplified for the elves. Law had assumed that she would know how to find what she was looking for.
“Yeah, yeah, just go and find out where all the trains are and where they’ve been,” she whispered as she wandered through the room, eyeing the hundreds of buttons and switches. Where was everyone? According to her grandfather, it was vital that the tracks were continuously monitored to avoid any collisions.