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"It is a good thing that we delayed, then." Earth Son earned a sharp look from even his First, Thorne Scratch. "We would have had to face both oni and the dragon at the same time."

Instead both had vanished away after having time to lay cooperative plans.

The dragon tracks led down to the river.

Earth Son made a sound of disgust, eyeing muddy water. "None of us will be able to track it in that."

"If Malice was sent by the oni on Onihida to distract us, then he will circle back to the city and attack."

Wolf was glad that Jewel Tear was protecting the enclaves. While the Stone Clan was weak on attack spells, they had the strongest defensive spells. "We should return."

Tinker and Jin found a working computer station and with some jury-rigging managed to get her state-of-art camera interfaced with the two-decade-old systems.

"I recorded about six hours so this is going to take a while." Tinker started the playback.

"
. . . we'll build a dictionary of his words
," her recorded voice started out the recording. Cloudwalker had been filming the dragon but had trouble tracking it as it moved through the scrap yard's offices.

"Riki says the dragon's name is Impatience," Tinker said, "but Riki has lied to me—a lot."

Jin attention was on the recording. He said nothing but he frowned slightly at this.

". . . mmmenananannaaaaaaapoooookaaaammmammamamyyyyyyaaanananammmmoooo . . ."

Impatience rambled on the recording.

"I'm not familiar with the name." Jin paused the recording after another minute of the dragon's monologue. "Dragons usually use a lot of words to say anything. Like 'a pleasantly warm but not too warm, sunny, cloudless time of the day that isn't dawn but the sun hasn't quite reached its zenith' for 'good morning'. It is considered rude to get to the point too quickly. When you talk to a dragon, you're supposed to elaborate as much as possible."

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"Dragon Etiquette 101?" Tinker asked.

"Historically, rude tengu are dragon snacks. This dragon, however, is being very to the point. He might come across as impatient to other dragons, which would explain his name."

"So you understand him."

"Yes, so far he's said, 'What is this object? Oh, this moves. Ah, it makes light. I wonder how. This part twists. What are these? I see. It does not work without those. Why does it not make light? Have I broken it? It seemed as if it was supposed to come apart. A diagram. I must have them backward. Ha, ha, ha.'"

"Yeah, I got the laughing part."

A female astronaut flew into the cabin with tengu grace, "Wai Sze is awake and wants to see the Scarecrow."

The tiny tengu woman was awake and looking surprisingly well compared to how awful she had been before. She gasped as Tinker swam into the infirmary. "Oh my, you
are
here! Oh, look at you! You're so beautiful."

Tinker blushed. As a female elf in a deep jewel-red silk dress in zero gee, she was attracting a lot of attention from the crew. "It's the dress."

"Ah, yes, it not so practical in space, is it, my dear? Xiao Chen, can you find her something to wear?"

Xiao Chen had been the crew member who summoned them to Gracie's side. The tengu female nodded, cocking her head to study Tinker's size before moving off, graceful as a bird in flight.

Jin looked at Tinker as if noticing the silk flowing around her for the first time and then smiled. "I don't know. It's good for morale. At least with the guys."

Tinker smacked him and found herself floating backward.

He laughed, and caught Tinker before she could hit something. "I am only joking."

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"Shoo, shoo!" Gracie waved Jin away. "I want to talk to her without your noisy squawking."

Jin smiled fondly at his cousin and flew away.

Gracie held out her unbroken hand to Tinker. "Let me look at you." Gracie had tears in her eyes, which Tinker expected, but not the brilliant smile that the fragile tengu bestowed on her. Tinker found herself smiling back. "You've got Leo's eyes and his smile."

"Yeah, I guess. The patented Dufae face."

"I'm so happy to see it. It hurt so much that I hadn't been able to give Leo a baby. It made losing him all the more horrible. He was a wonderful, wonderful man and he was utterly gone."

It occurred to Tinker for the first time how awful to lose your husband—never see him again—and a sudden fear took root in her. What if she couldn't get back to Windwolf? What if she never saw him again?

"There, there, my love." Gracie wiped Tinker's tears away. "We'll get you back to him somehow."

"Yeah, I know, we're working on it." Tinker sniffed.

"Let me see your leg. I know Jin, he probably didn't think to clean that cut. He might be Dalai Lama of the crows, but he's hopeless with first aid."

Gracie deftly took off the bandage, gently cleaned the wound and applied an antiseptic, and rebandaged the cut.

"Are you a medic?" Tinker asked her.

"I'm the ship's xenobiologist," Gracie said.

"You're kidding."

Gracie looked up in surprise, and Tinker found herself talking about Lain, and then about Esme. "Have you told her? I don't think she's realized who you are yet."

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Tinker shook her head. "Right now, it's all too weird. I don't even want to think about it. Besides, I'm kind of ticked at her. Not about leaving me. About everyone having to lie to me about it because—I don't know—some strange family stuff. I didn't know the truth for eighteen years. She can go on not knowing for a couple of days. I'll tell her later."

Xiao Chen flew into the area, carrying a set of clothes. "These should fit our Scarecrow."

"I don't know if I like that nickname." Tinker took the clothes and drifted awkwardly as she checked the pant size against her waist.

Xiao Chen laughed. "I am sorry. For so long, we did not know your name, just that you were the Scarecrow."

"Did you tell everyone about your dream?" Tinker asked Gracie.

Xiao Chen, though, answered. "All of us that slept that night shared Wai Sze's dream—that is her ability.

She is our dream crow."

"In some ways, we are more bird than human," Gracie said.

"Can you see the future?" Tinker asked "How am I going to get us out of this mess?"

Gracie shook her head. "Where one person can determine the future, the way is clear, but we're in a tangle of possibilities. Many people can push the future one way or another. This is a time when everyone will determine the end."

Since there were no private places, Tinker turned her back and they pretended to ignore her, talking in Chinese, as she changed. She tried not to feel like they were talking about her. Certainly with the ship falling out of orbit, they had plenty of things to discuss. At least with the dress on, she was able to change panties and pull on her pants without flashing them. The pants were a little loose, but Xiao Chen had included a length of nylon cord to serve as a belt.

Tinker turned back around and pulled on the knotted cord. "I look the part of the scarecrow now."

The tengu laughed.

"I've been greedy." Gracie reached out and squeezed Tinker's hand. "I've kept you here too long. Thank you for letting me see you."

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Tinker hugged her good-bye and returned to the task of finding out how to get them back home to Windwolf.

* * *

Impatience, it turned out, had been trying to teach her a spell. It incorporated math, something that Elvish spells didn't do, and used magic to manipulate time and space. It took everything she knew and pushed it in a new direction using an entirely new symbol set. Jin translated the words and then, later, the number system that Impatience used but looked mystified by most of what he was saying.

"You understand this?" Jin asked.

"Yes, yes. The roots of elfin magic are here, but taken to another order of understanding. This is recognizing the quantum nature of magic and its effects
across
boundaries of realities. My god, I really screwed up. I never considered that I could warp the fabric of space and time on this kind of scale."

"What?" Jin cried in surprise. "
You
made this mess?"

"I had help. Okay, here's what happened." She found a marker in her pocket and drew a planet on the nearest wall. "The oni forced me to build a downsized gate on Elfhome. I set up a resonance between my gate and the orbital gate." She drew both gates in their proper positions and the wavy resonance line between them. "Now, Leo's gate was flawed. The time coordinate was never set." She drew the ships entering the orbital gate. "So the default time coordinate became the moment of the gate's destruction—or around midnight Eastern standard time, seven—eight days ago."

She had totally lost track of time since she landed on the spaceship. What day was it now?

Jin understood the result. "Thus the collision."

"Yeah. Old news. This is the important part—all the ships, when they passed through the gate, must have picked up the resonance signature." She drew a ship on the other side of the gate, labeled it
Dahe
Hao,
and continued the wavy line to it. "As long as there are objects in orbit, the resonance will continue, which is why the Discontinuity hasn't collapsed. It's because of this link, that when I fell into the Ghostlands, I ended up onboard. For every action, though, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Basically the power spike originates here on Elfhome and travels in this direction—" She drew an arrow parallel to the wavy line through the planet. "—the multiuniverse is trying to drag the
Dahe Hao
back along this line." She drew a second arrow from the ship running beside the resonance path toward the planet. "Again, as long as the Discontinuity continues, the
Dahe Hao
will be affected by this force."

She turned and was startled to find her audience had grown from Jin to about twenty crew members.

"Um, well, this isn't all bad. We can use this force to our advantage. The entire ship and everyone on it is
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keyed to
this
location." She underlined Turtle Creek. "Now, if you look at this section of the text . . ."

She pointed to the screen. "This is a spell. It creates a sphere of hyperphase. All we need to do is cast this spell which will step the ship into hyperphase and follow the line of force back to Pittsburgh."

"That's
all?
" Esme said.

Tinker turned back and found her audience had grown again. Esme and another twenty crew members crowded the small area. "My biggest concern is power. If the amount of magic we feed into the spell is too small, it will just punch a hole in the middle of the ship. We need enough power that we can guarantee that the entire ship goes. Even if we think we have sufficient magic, we probably should gather everyone close to the spell, and close all the hatches between the sections of the ship."

"What we've collected isn't enough?" Esme asked.

"I don't think so, and access time on it is slow. The spell is set up to mimic how the dragons cast magic with their mane. With elf magic, there's a timing ring around the spell that controls the power coming in. It gives the magic a slow steady burn. This spell takes all the free magic and converts it in one burst." Tinker sketched the ship and put an "X" at roughly the center of the ship. "It's kind of like dropping a stone into a pool of water. Splash!" She drew in the initial impact in a large circle around the "X". "That's the rock hitting the surface. There seems to be some resulting ripples in the fabric of space." She added larger circles around the first, and then shaded in the space between the circles. "I'm not sure what the ripples will do, but I can't imagine the delay factor will be good for the structural integrity of the ship."

"In other words," Jin sought to clarify what she said, "part of the ship returns to Pittsburgh seconds before the next section goes?"

"Yes. Leo's gate, however flawed, did transfer all the ship to the same second. These ripples would have a different time coordinate, so probably we're looking at pieces of the ship arriving in Pittsburgh—unless we hit it with a damn big rock."

"So where do we get it?"

"I don't know. If we could tap the spring under Turtle Creek, that would work, but I don't see any evidence that power is seeping through."

There was no sign of Malice in Oakland when Wolf and the others returned to the enclaves. Maynard had set up a command center in the building across the street from Poppymeadow's. He and the NSA agents had set up lookout posts across the city, linked by radio.

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"Unless it can go invisible, it hasn't appeared in the city yet." Maynard tapped three points on the map.

"Between the Cathedral of Learning, the USX building, and Mount Washington, we can see for miles—and Stormsong said that this thing was huge."

Wolf nodded. "Unfortunately, it will be dark soon."

Someone was hammering upstairs. The hammering stopped, and something large moved overhead accompanied by an odd rhythmic clicking noise.

Wolf cocked his head, trying to place the sound. "What is that?"

Stormsong glanced toward Earth Son standing in the street, just outside the open door, and lowered her voice. "
Domi's nagarou
brought the little dragon, so the humans can see what we're fighting."

Interesting how one afternoon could change your perspective on size.

Maynard had caught Stormsong's caution and spoke quietly in English. "Briggs and Durrack are seeing what works against it."