i 2d586356cf1586df (42 page)

"Well, doh." Tinker dug through her pockets until she found a length of wire and her screwdriver set.

"Magic is causing your systems to crash."

"Magic?" Esme echoed, looking mystified.

Tinker realized that none of the colonists could see the magic. "That's Elfhome and this universe has magic. Your computer systems aren't shielded for it."

"Oh fuck, it is blindingly obvious, isn't it?" Esme pressed her palm to her forehead, took a deep breath, and let it out. "I should have thought of that when I started to dream true again. Okay. This system controls my engines. Right after the crash, I pulled into what should have been a stable orbit and started up the rotation that allows for the artificial gravity. We're drifting, though. If I don't correct our orbit, we're going to enter the planet's atmosphere—and my ship is not designed to survive re-entry."

"Okay." Tinker took the lantern from Jin and started to strip it for parts. "We need to first siphon off the magic, and then create shielding for the system. Here's what I need . . ."

Tinker had never worked with astronauts before and was amazed how quickly they learned. While Esme had fired the positioning jets to stop the ship's rotation and pulled them back into a stable orbit, Jin drafted a team of people to drain excess magic from the computer equipment. Despite Esme's "you're the Scarecrow" statements, everyone seemed hesitant about Tinker actually working with the ship's systems.

After Tinker trained the astronauts, she found herself in a supervisory-only position. She floated in place, stranded by the lack of gravity, with an ice pack strapped to her ankle.

For some reason—whether it was because Tinker had missed the event, or because she was the ultimate outsider as an elf, or because she had magically appeared—the astronauts started to tell her their stories. They had gone through a harrowing experience, filled with confusion, death, lucky chances, small
Page 271

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

miracles, and a great deal of heroics. At the core of it all was Esme, riding roughshod over rules and logic, ruthless in purpose, making one lucky guess after another. Esme, everyone agreed, forged a miracle, salvaging what should have been complete disaster.

Even Esme opened up to Tinker when they found themselves alone together. "One summer, while I was in college, I went to visit my older sister on Elfhome. Two months on another world—it seemed like an exotic vacation. Then the dreams started—like I had some third eye that had been forced open and I was made to see. Some of what I had to do was so very clear, like changing my master's degree to astrophysics and applying to NASA. Some of it was—blind faith—that it would matter. Somehow."

"I hate to tell you this, but I have no idea how to help you beyond this."

"This buys me time, which is what I needed most, Scarecrow." Esme scowled at her screens. "It gives me a chance to figure out what the fuck to do next."

"Don't call me Scarecrow. I rented the movie and watched it. Everyone in that movie was a dysfunctional idiot."

"You didn't read the books? The Scarecrow is the wisest being in Oz and rules the kingdom after the wizard and Dorothy leave."

Tinker found the news vaguely disturbing. "That doesn't help."

"It's like flying blind in the clouds—you have to have faith in what instruments tell you. The dreams told me that I needed you. Things are still iffy—but I have a chance now to make everything right."

Tinker was torn between relief and annoyance that Esme seemed to think Tinker's part was done. She didn't want to be responsible for all the astronauts, but she didn't want to be stuck in space either. She didn't know what else to do. She couldn't even stay decent. Without gravity to constrain it, the skirt of Tinker's red silk dress developed a life of its own, determined to show off her panties as often as possible. Still, she had hoped they had gotten past all the dream bullshit. She hated not having an obvious direction to go, a clear-cut problem to solve. The path here had been so convoluted, the clues so obscure, that she would never have guessed where it was taking her. She supposed that she could only do everything she could imagine, and hope that one of them was the right thing.

Sighing, Tinker nudged one of the magic sinks. "These are just makeshift. They'll fill quickly and then leak. We'll have to burn off the magic until we can create a large, permanent storage tank."

"How do we do burn it?" Esme asked.

Page 272

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"You burn it off by doing spells," Tinker explained. "It can be used to create heat, light, cool things off, do healing—"

"Healing?" Jin seized hold of the word, proving that her "private" conversation with Esme had been just an illusion.

Tinker pulled out her datapad and made sure it worked. "Well, I have spells for healing but I don't know much about—"

Jin didn't let Tinker finish. He scooped her up and they flew through the ship as if Jin had wings. "We've got so many wounded that we've wiped out the
Dahe
's supplies. Most of the medical supplies on the other ships were destroyed."

"I really don't know much about healing," Tinker finally managed to finish her statement.

"We're desperate. Some of our people—we can't do any more for them."

"Are they tengu?" Tinker asked.

He stopped and looked down at her. "You won't help us?"

"I didn't say that—although a 'please' would go a long way. It makes a difference what spells I use.

Some won't work on humans—but they might work on tengu."

"Please, help my people. I beg you. They're dying."

She felt shame and anger at the same time that he would think she would let a wounded person die merely because of some biological difference she could barely see. "I'll do what I can. I just don't know how much that will be."

The infirmary was a tiny cramped place stained with blood, filled with people hooked to machines. The beds were more like cocoons with nylon bags holding the patients flat. Jin paused at the first bed to gaze at a blond man lying there.

"What happened to Chan Way Kay?"

"Sorry, Jin, we lost her," a man said from back of the room.

Page 273

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"This is Wai Sze Wong." Jin turned Tinker's attention to the patient to her other side. "She's tengu."

Wai Sze was Black from Tinker's dream. More a sparrow than a crow, she was a little female with delicate wrists and fingers. Massive bruising on Wai Sze ran the range from deep purple to pale yellow.

Apparently they had run out of surgical tape, as black electrical tape held splints on Wai Sze's left arm and leg in place. The monitors on her showed an unsteady heartbeat.

Tinker gasped in the shock of recognition and the extent of Wai Sze's injuries. "I—I—can only guess at how to help her."

"So guess." Jin gave her a look that spoke of trust and confidence. "We have done all we can, and she's only getting worse. If you can't save her, then we're going to lose her."

Tinker sighed and tried to think. Riki had recuperated quickly from the savage beating Tinker had given him, so the tengu probably had recuperative powers similar to the elves'. Tinker had saved Windwolf's life with a spell that focused magic into his natural healing powers. The ambient level of the ship, while enough to wreak havoc on the unshielded computer systems, was actually quite low. If the tengu's ability was close enough to the elves', the same spell might save Wai Sze. She searched the memory of her datapad and found that she did have the spell downloaded.

"Do you have transferable circuit paper?" Tinker asked.

Jin nodded.

"Okay," Tinker said. "I need the first magic sink we set up, some power leads, and a computer connection so I can print on the circuit paper."

One of these days she had to learn bio magic. She hated gambling with people's lives. Hopefully today wasn't going to be the day that she guessed wrong.

She explained to the doctor how she needed Wai Sze prepped while Jin sent people off to fetch the sinks and leads, and then Jin took her to print off the spell.

"If this spell works, we can use it on all the tengu." She explained to Jin how it focused magic on the tengu's natural abilities. "But it's useless on humans. For them, I'll need to see if there is a spell for their specific injury in my codex. It will be a much slower process."

"Let's save the spell onto this system; that way, if Wai Sze shows improvement, I can come back and print off more spells while you start working with the humans."

Page 274

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

When they returned, they found Wai Sze stripped bare to her waist. Burning with embarrassment, Tinker peeled the protective sheet from the circuit paper and pressed the spell to Wai Sze's small chest as Jin watched her intently. It required a lot of fiddling to make sure it was smoothed down over the hills and valleys of Wai Sze's breasts. On the female's hip was a tattoo of a lion overlaying the Leo star constellation, Leo's heart—the star Regulus—a blaze of blue-white in its chest. Tinker used it to change the subject. "She's a Leo?"

"Hmm? Oh, that, no, it's for Gracie's husband, Leo. He got a tattoo for her in the same place, a little bird."

Gracie was obviously the Americanization of Wai Sze's name. Leo was the name of Tinker's father, killed by the tengu before she was born. "He's a tengu?"

"No, Leo was human. He was my college roommate at MIT—and my best friend for many years."

"Was?"

Jin glanced at her sharply. Whatever he saw on her face made his hard look softened. "Leo and Gracie were like Romeo and Juliet. They fell madly in love at first sight. Their families didn't want them to be together. They got secretly married. And it all ended in senseless tragedy. Leo was killed in an accident, and for the last five years, Gracie has been suicidal with grief. Crows mate for life."

"Leo's family didn't want him to marry her?" Tinker asked. "They knew she was tengu?"

"No. We were Chinese—that was enough."

Yes, that would have been enough. Much as she loved her grandfather, she knew the truth of his bigotry.

She had been wondering why she dreamed of Gracie. Now she could only remember how the little tengu female had endlessly wept in her dreams.

Tinker had taped the leads to the power-distributor ring of the spell and hooked the other ends to the battery. "You check to make sure all the metal is clear of the spell. It would distort the effect of the spell, which could be deadly. The activation word is pronounced this way."

Jin listened closely, and then nodded as the outer ring powered up, casting a glowing sphere over the rest of the spell. The healing spell itself kicked in, the timing cycle ring clicking quickly clockwise as the magic flowed through the spell in a steady rhythm. "How long before we can tell if it's going to work?"

Page 275

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Tinker shrugged. "On an elf, I could tell immediately."

As they watched, color flushed back into Gracie's face and her breathing grew deeper. The machines monitoring her health verified that her heart was stabilizing.

Jin clapped his hands, just like an elf would, to summon the attention of the gods to him, and then whispered a prayer. Tinker floated in place, gazing at the female who would have been her mother, if everything had gone differently. Had it been chance that put Gracie on the same ship as Esme—or some dream-inspired plan of Tinker's real mother?

Jin finished his prayer and turned to Tinker. "Thank you. Truly you must have been sent by the gods to us."

"No, just the wizard of Oz."

21: NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Wolf was ready to kill something. They should have been reacting quickly, but instead they stalled with negotiations. Wolf had demanded that one of the Stone Clan return to the enclaves to guard the noncombatants. Earth Son assigned the task to Jewel Tear but then tried to maneuver True Flame into qualifying it as a failure on Wolf's part to protect the enclaves.

"I can choose to protect the enclaves," Wolf said, "and leave you to face the dragon."

"We will have the dreadnaught," Earth Son pointed out.

"No, we won't," True Flame snapped. "Human weapons can't pierce the dragon shielding. The dreadnaught is good at spotting and attacking ground troops. It would be an aerial banquet table for the dragon."

"We should travel light," True Flame continued. "One Hand each. The fewer we have to protect, the better."

Wolf let Wraith choose which of his
sekasha
would remain. Wolf drew Little Horse and Stormsong aside; of the
sekasha
returning to the enclaves, they were the ones best suited to interacting with humans.

"Call Maynard. Let him know what his people might be facing. They need to know that their weapons
Page 276

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

won't work on this."

* * *

"We should wait until it comes to us. Running around looking for it will only weaken our position."

Wolf scoffed at this idea. "Sit here on our hands while it does what it will to the city?"

"Property damage can be fixed later," Earth Son said.

"And what of the humans?" Wolf said.

Earth Son had the gall to say, "I do not know why you fuss so. They are short-lived anyhow."

"I think we should go and be the heroes." Forest Moss struck a heroic pose. "Females are attracted to males of action."

"What females?" Earth Son cried.

"Poor Earth Son, I might have one blind eye—" Forest Moss tapped his cheek under his ruined eye and then reached out to tap both of Earth Son's. "—but apparently you have two."