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"What did she say?" Tinker really had to get these guys radios. She hated having to ask what was going on; until recently, she had always known more than everyone else.

"They found something you should see."

The police had strung yellow tape across the street in an attempt to cordon off the valley; it rustled ominously in a stiff breeze. Ducking under the tape, Tinker and her Shields joined the others. The one personality rule extended to the Blades; only Rainlily got to talk. Cloudwalker and Little Egret moved off, searching the area for possible threats.

"We found this in the middle of the road." Rainlily held out a bulky white, waterproof envelope.

"Forgiveness, we had to check it for traps."

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The envelope was addressed with all possible renditions of her name: Alexander Graham Bell, "Tinker"

written in English, and finally Elvish runes of "Tinker of the Wind Clan." The
sekasha
had already slit it open to examine the contents and replaced them. Tinker tented open the envelope and peered inside; it held an old MP3 player and a note written in English.

I have great remorse for what I did. I'm sorry for hurting you both. I wish there had been another
way. Riki Shoji.

"Yeah, right." Tinker scoffed and crumpled up the note and flung it away. "Like that makes everything okay, you damn crow."

She wanted to throw the MP3 player too, but it wasn't hers. Oilcan had loaned it to Riki. The month she'd been at Aum Renau, Oilcan and Riki had become friends. Or at least, Oilcan thought they were friends, just the same as he thought they were both human. Riki, though, was a lying oni spy, complete with bird-feet and magically retractable crow wings. He'd wormed his way into their lives just to kidnap Tinker. She doubted that Oilcan would want the player back now that he knew the truth; it would be a permanent reminder that Oilcan's trust nearly cost Tinker her life. But it wasn't her right to decide for him.

She jammed the player into the back pocket of her shorts. "Let's go."

Rage smoldered inside her until they had worked their way down to the Discontinuity. The mystery of the Ghostlands deepened, drowning out her anger. The edge of the blue seemed uneven at first, but then, as she crouched down to eye it closely, she realized that the effect "pooled" like water, and that the ragged edge was due to the elevation of the land—like the edge of a pond. Despite the August heat, ice gathered in the shadows. This close, she could hear a weird white noise, not unlike the gurgle of a river.

She found a long stick and prodded at the blue-shaded earth; it slowly gave like thick mud. She moved along the "shore" testing the shattered pieces of three worlds within reach of her stick. Earth fire hydrant.

Onihida building. Elfhome ironwood tree. While they looked solid, everything within the zone of destruction was actually insubstantial, giving under the firm poke of her stick.

Pony stiffened with alarm when—after examining the stick for damage done to it and finding it as sound as before—she reached her hand out over the line.

Oddly, there was a resistance in the air over the land—as if Tinker was holding her hand out the window of a moving car. The air grew cooler as she lowered her hand. It was so very creepy that she had to steel herself to actually touch the dirt.

It was like plunging her bare hand into snow. Bitterly cold, the dirt gave under her fingertips. Within seconds, the chill was painful. She jerked her hand back.

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"Domi?"
Pony moved closer to her.

"I'm fine." Tinker cupped her left hand around her right. As she stood, blowing warmth onto her cold-reddened fingers, she gazed out onto the Ghostlands. She could feel magic on her new
domana
senses, but normally—like strong electrical currents—heat accompanied magic. Was the "shift"

responsible for the cold? The presence of magic, however, would explain why the area was still unstable—sustaining whatever reaction the gate's destruction created. If her theory was right, once the ambient magic was depleted, the effect would collapse and the area would revert back to solid land. The only question was the rate of decay.

Pony picked up a stone and skipped it out across the disturbance. Faint ripples formed where the stone struck. After kissing "dirt" three times, the stone stopped about thirty feet in. For a minute it sat on the surface and then, slowly but perceivably, it started to sink.

Pony made a small puzzled noise. "Why isn't everything sinking?"

"I think—because they're all in the same space—which isn't quite here but isn't really someplace else—or maybe they're everywhere at once. The trees are stable, because to them, the earth underneath them is as stable as they are."

"Like ice on water?"

"Hmm." The analogy would serve, since she wasn't sure if she was right. They worked their way around the edge, the hilly terrain making it difficult. At first they found sections of paved road or cut through abandoned buildings, which made the going easier. Eventually, though, they'd worked their way out of the transferred Pittsburgh area and into Elfhome proper.

On the bank of a creek, frozen solid where it overlapped the affected area, they found a dead black willow tree, lying on its side, and a wide track of churned dirt where another willow had stalked northward.

Pony scanned the dim elfin woods for the carnivorous tree. "We must take care. It is probably still nearby; they don't move fast."

"I wonder what killed it." Tinker poked at the splayed root legs still partly inside the Discontinuity. Frost like freezer burn dusted the wide, sturdy trunk. Otherwise it seemed undamaged; the soft mud and thick brush of the creek bank had cushioned its fall so none of its branches or tangle arms had been broken.

"Lain would love an intact tree." The xenobiologist often complained that the only specimens she ever could examine were the nonambulatory seedlings or mature trees blown to pieces to render them harmless. "I wish I could get it to her somehow."

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The tracks of both trees, Tinker noticed, started in the Ghostlands. Had the willow been clear of the Discontinuity at the time of the explosion—or had the tree died after reaching stable ground?

"Let me borrow one of your knives." Tinker used the knife Pony handed her to score an ironwood sapling. "I want to be able to track the rate of decay. Maybe there's a way I could accelerate it."

"A slash for every one of your feet the sapling stands from the Ghostlands?" Pony guessed her system.

"Yeah." She was going to move on to the next tree but he held out his hand for his knife. "What?"

"I would rather you stay back as much as possible from the edge." He waited with the grinding power of glaciers for her to hand back his knife. "How do you feel,
domi
?"

Ah, the source of his sudden protectiveness. It was going to be a while before she could live down overestimating herself the night of the fighting. Instead of going quietly to the hospice, she'd roamed about, made love, and did all sorts of silliness—and of course, fell flat on her face later. It probably occurred to him that if she nose-dived again, she would end up in the Ghostlands.

"I'm fine," she reassured him.

"You look tired." He slashed the next sapling, and she had to admit he actually made cleaner, easier-to-see marks than she did, robbing her of all chance to quibble with him.

She made a rude noise. Actually, she was exhausted—nightmares had disrupted her sleep for the last two days. But she didn't want to admit that; the
sekasha
might gang up on her and drag her back to the hospice. That was the problem with bringing five of them—it was much harder to bully them en masse—especially since they were all a foot taller than her. Sometimes she really hated being five foot nothing. Standing with them was like being surrounded by heavily armed trees. Even now Stormsong was eyeing her closely.

"I'm just—thinking." She mimed what she hoped looked like deep thought. "This is very perplexing."

Pony bought it, but he trusted her, perhaps more than he should. Stormsong seemed unconvinced, but said nothing. They moved on, marking saplings.

With an unknown number of oni scattered through the forest and hidden disguised among the human population of Pittsburgh, Wolf did not want to be dealing with the invasion of his
domi's
privacy, but it
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had to be stopped before the queen's representative arrived in Pittsburgh. Since all requests through human channels had failed, it was time to take the matter into his own hands.

Wolf stalked through the broken front door of the photographer's house, his annoyance growing into anger. Unfortunately, the photographer—paparazzi was the correct English word for his kind, but Wolf was not sure how to decline the word out—in question was determined to make things as difficult as possible.

Over the last two weeks, Wolf's people had worked through a series of false names and addresses to arrive at a narrow row house close to the Rim in Oakland. The houses to either side had been converted into businesses, due to their proximity to the enclaves. While the racial mix of the street was varied, the next door neighbors were Chinese. The owners had watched nervously as Windwolf broke down the photographer's door, but made no move to interfere. Judging by their remarks to each other in Mandarin, neither did they know that Wolf could speak Mandarin in addition to English, nor were they surprised by his presence—they seemed to think the photographer was receiving his due.

Inside the house, Wolf was starting to understand why.

One long narrow room took up most of the first floor beyond the shattered door. Filth dulled the wood floors and smudged the once white walls to an uneven gray. On the right wall, at odds with the grubby state of the house, was video wallpaper showing recorded images of Wolf's
domi
, Tinker. The film loop had been taken a month ago, showing a carefree Tinker laughing with the five female
sekasha
of Wolf's household. The image had been carefully doctored and scaled so that it gave the illusion that one gazed out a large window overlooking the private garden courtyard of Poppymeadow's enclave. Obviously feeling safe from prying eyes, Tinker lounged in her nightgown, revealing all her natural sexuality.

Wolf had seen the still pictures of Tinker in a digital magazine but hadn't realized that there was more.

Judging by the stacks of cardboard boxes, there was much more. He flicked open the nearest box and found DVDs titled
Princess Gone Wild, Uncensored
.

"Where is he?" Wolf growled to his First, Wraith Arrow.

Wraith tilted his head slightly upward to indicate upstairs. "There's more."

At the top of the creaking wooden stairs, there was a large room empty of furniture. A camouflage screen covered the lone window, projecting a blank brick wall to the outside world. A camera on a tripod peered through a slit in the screen, trained down at the enclaves. This room's video wallpaper replayed images captured this morning, a somber Tinker sitting alone under the peach trees, dappled sunlight moving over her.

Wolf moved the camera, and the device's artificial intelligence shrank Tinker's image into one corner and went to live images as the zoom lens played over Poppymeadow's enclave where Wolf's household was
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living. Not only did the balcony provide a clear view over the high stone demesne wall but into the windows of all the buildings, from the main hall to the coach house. One of Poppymeadow's staff was changing linens in a guest wing bedroom; the camera automatically recognized the humanoid form and adjusted the focus until she filled the wall. The window was open, and a microphone picked up her humming.

"I haven't done anything illegal," a man was saying in the next room in English. "I know my rights! I'm protected by the treaty."

Wolf stalked into the last room. His
sekasha
had broken down the door to get in. The only piece of furniture was an unmade bed that reeked of old sweat and spent sex. His
sekasha
had a small rat of a man pinned against the far wall.

On the wall, images of Wolf's
domi
moved through their bedroom at Poppymeadow's, languidly stripping out of her clothes. "You want to do it?" she asked huskily. Wolf could remember the day, had replayed it in his mind again and again as his last memory of her when he thought he had lost her. "Come on, we have time."

She dropped the last piece of clothing on the floor, and the camera zoomed in tighter to play down over her body. Wolf snarled out the command for the winds and slammed its power into the wall. The wall boomed, the house shuddering at the impact, and the wallpaper went black. Tinker's voice, however, continued with a soft moan of delight.

"Hey! Hey!" the man cried in English. "Do you have any idea how expensive that is? You can't just smash in here and break my stuff. I have rights."

"You had rights. They've been revoked." Wolf returned to the balcony and knocked the camera from its tripod. The wallpaper showed a somersault of confusion as the camera flipped end over end. When it struck pavement, it shattered into small unrecognizable pieces, and the wallpaper flickered back to the previously recorded loop of Tinker sitting in the garden.

"Evacuate the area," Wolf ordered in low Elvish. "I'm razing these buildings."

Apparently the man understood Elvish, because he yelped out, "What? You can't do that! I've called the police! You can't do this! This is Pittsburgh! I have rights!"

As if summoned by his words, a commotion downstairs announced the arrival of the Pittsburgh police.