Dufae’s chest had contained twelve “loaded” nactka. The twins exchanged glances and shivered. Dufae had opened the box and instantly known that he had to flee with it to Earth where it was harmless, lest it fall into the wrong hands. According to Yves, Ming had it now on Elfhome.
“The dragons had tried to isolate Onihida. Keep the evil that had taken root from spreading. But they missed one pathway. The oni guessed of its existence, but they couldn’t find it. Somehow they tricked the elves into finding it. As the oni started to flood their people through it to China, we got out the newborn Chosen One and all of the blood-guard children that survived our enslavement. We fled to Japan and took refuge in a mountainous temple with a sect of warrior monks known as the yamabushi.”
That explained his Japanese name. Louise wondered what kind of magical powers he had. She also wondered what exactly Joy could do. If Providence could give out magical powers, what did it mean for the baby dragon?
Crow Boy lifted his head and gave Louise a desperate look. “We thought Jin Wong had sacrificed himself on the chance of finding us a new home, one where we could live free. We’ve been waiting for the mark of Providence to appear on a new Chosen. So many of the bloodline have been killed, and now the oni has the baby in their control, and because of that, Riki let himself fall into their power. At the hospital, though, you said that Jin’s returning. Does that mean he’s not dead?”
He wanted it to be true. Considering all that he’d been through — and what could lay ahead — it seemed cruel to tell him that she had no idea what she had babbled out.
“I–I-I don’t know. .” She couldn’t crush his hope. “I don’t know how he’ll return. Or when.”
“Please, can you try to do another prophecy?”
The word shocked Louise. Prophecy? Her?
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Louise said. “I don’t even remember what I said. It sounded like nonsense to me. Jillian covered my eyes.” Louise unfolded one of the napkins that had come with the takeout and pressed it to her face to illustrate. “And it just happened.”
“We could get an Ouija board,” Jillian grumbled. “Would make as much sense.”
Louise blushed and started to drop her hands, but Crow Boy caught her wrist.
“Please. Just try.” His voice sounded husky, like he was about to cry.
She took a deep breath. Just try? Try what? If she did have a magical power, so far she had only done the equivalent of randomly changing channels on a television. What she needed was meaningful search terms to pull up what she wanted. Captain Jin Wong. The Tainlong Hao. Providence’s Chosen One. What had she been thinking of at the hospital? They were trying to feed the police information on Alexander being in danger. .
“Brilliance strikes into the darkness!” It was like plugging into an electrical outlet: power came sure and strong. “The attack is true, and the dark pathway is torn asunder! All that were trapped are free! Providence Child spreads his wings as he falls. He falls!”
Louise found herself on her feet, pointing toward the window.
Something streaked past, a fiery comet in the dark night.
“What the hell?” Jillian ran across the room to lean against the glass. “What is that?”
“It’s Esme!” Louise cried. “She’s trying to save Providence’s Child.”
42: Plan B
“They say something has happened to the gate!” Nikola reported as he joined them at the window. They’d been watching a continuous storm of burning debris rain down through the night sky. “They think something hit it. They’ve lost contact with the crew that maintained it, and there’s a huge debris field where it should be and where it shouldn’t be. Though I’m not sure what that means.”
“It probably means that there is debris that they can’t account for.” Louise couldn’t tear herself away from the window. “The wrong orbital plane. The wrong trajectory.”
“Like from a colony ship?” Nikola asked.
Louise shook her head. “No. It couldn’t have been a ship that hit it. Earth’s gate can only jump spaceships to Alpha Centauri Bb; the ships can’t return back through it. Even if the colonists somehow built their own hyperphase gate to return to Earth, it would be astronomically improbable that the exit point would be the same exact position as the Earth’s gate.”
“But you said Providence’s Child was falling!” Crow Boy leaned against the glass, staring up at the night sky. “You said Jin Wong was returning to us!”
She had? When she tried to recall the exact words, though, they slipped through her memory like elusive minnows, darting this way and that. It was as if even as she tried to catch hold of the words, they changed as the future changed.
“Esme did say that she had to leave Earth to do something important. Maybe she was going to get Jin Wong.” For some odd reason, Jillian stared downwards toward the street instead of up at the sky.
Did it mean that Jin Wong was tumbling through space, falling to Earth, with Esme desperately trying to catch him? Try as she might, Louise couldn’t force that scenario onto the facts she knew. The colony ships couldn’t jump back to Earth. Even if they could, “debris” indicated that neither ship remained intact. Did the elusive nature of what Louise foretold mean that Esme had probably failed at her attempt to save Jin Wong?
“If the gate is gone,” Jillian said slowly as if trying to work out a difficult logic problem, “why hasn’t Pittsburgh returned?” She pointed at the quarantine zone just a block from the hotel’s parking lot. “Shouldn’t it be right there?”
They stared at the dark Elfhome forest in silence.
Jillian chanted a litany of, “This is bad. Badbadbad. Really bad. We’re totally screwed.”
“Don’t say ‘screwed.’” Louise murmured as she struggled to be calm and find a satellite that had caught the accident.
“There’s nothing we can do!” Jillian cried. “Nothing. There’s huge ginormous hunks of stuff falling out of the sky that we can’t change or stop or anything.”
Louise locked down on a scream until she could say calmly, “We will find a way to deal with this. First, we need to know what exactly we’re facing.”
Within a few minutes, she found a Russian spy satellite that had been launched while the Chinese started the construction of the hyperphase gate. Over thirty years of silent observation with nothing more to report than occasional spaceships jumping to another star system. The spy satellite showed a confusion of metal pieces drifting where the gate had been. Louise scanned backwards through the satellite’s memory, watching the accident in reverse. The debris coalesced down then vanished, replaced by the gate, wreathed in violent greens and reds.
“It’s never looked like that before.” Crow Boy leaned over her shoulder. “Is that Rim fire?”
“Maybe,” Louise said. There had been no explosion, just one moment the large round gate had been there, and the next debris, all seemingly too straight to ever have been part of the circular structure.
Jillian snorted with contempt, despite the fact she didn’t know any better than Louise. “Rim fire is simply an aurora effect caused by the collision of energetic charged particles in the field that holds Pittsburgh on Elfhome.”
But normally Rim fire only appeared on Elfhome. Why was it suddenly wreathing the gate? And was the debris even from the gate?