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"This is by order of the crown," Stormsong said. "There is nothing you can do to stop it."

Maynard saw Stormsong first and then scanned downward to find Tinker. "What are you doing here?"

"I want to talk to you about this stuff." Tinker waved the newspaper at Maynard.

"I'm busy at the moment. Why don't you get your husband to explain it to you?"

"Because you're here. I have the power to pin you down and make you explain it to me. And you'll use words I can understand."

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Maynard glanced at the paper. "What don't you understand? That article is fairly clear."

"What can I do?"

He gave her a long unreadable look before saying, "I'm not sure. Windwolf bought us some time, but without proof that the gate is in orbit and possibly repairable, that time runs out Sunday."

Figures, after everything she had gone through to destroy the gate, she now had to save it.

"So," Tinker said, "if I can prove the damn thing is still up there, would that help?"

Maynard's eyes widened in surprise. "You think you can do that?"

It was tempting to say yes, but she had to be honest. "I don't know. I can try. It's a fucking discontinuity in Turtle Creek, across at least two or three universes. If Earth is one of those universes, there might be a way to use the Ghostlands to communicate."

"The elves are keeping everyone away from the Ghostlands," Maynard said. "The scientists at the commune are ready to storm the place for a chance to study it."

"Keep them away from it," Tinker said. "At least until we can make sure the Fire Clan and the Stone Clan don't kill them on sight."

Maynard looked away, as if to hide what he thought. When he turned back, his face was back to its carefully neutral—nearly elfin—facade.

"What do you fucking want from me?" Tinker cried. "I was raised in a junkyard!"

"You're the only one in a position to understand fully what it is to be human," Maynard said, "and still be able to do anything about this situation."

"But I don't know what to do."

"I know you don't," Maynard said but didn't add anything more—which would have been a big help.

There was a pulse from Forest Moss and this time the building wasn't empty. She—and Forest Moss—picked up two people still inside on the second floor. A shout went up. Tinker turned to see the
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Wyverns swarm in through the door of a tiny secondhand shop. Like flashbulbs going off, she felt spells flaring the small rooms into brilliance, one after another. The Wyverns quickly worked their way to the room with the hidden couple.

"Oh, no." Tinker started for the store.

Stormsong pulled her short. "They are only killing oni."

Was that supposed to make it better? Much as she hated the kitsune, she didn't want to see Chiyo beheaded. She didn't want Riki dead any more than she wanted Nathan hurt.

"We can't go in there—it would be asking for a fight." Stormsong kept hold of her. "One we cannot win.

Wait. Please."

Much as she wanted to protect the strangers, she couldn't bear the thought of sacrificing her
sekasha
.

Tinker nodded numbly and pulled out of Stormsong's hold. "Let's get closer."

She lost sight of the storefront beyond the wall of backs. This time her
sekasha
had to clear a path, pushing people aside to make what they thought was a wide enough path for her. Maybe if she was an elephant.

The Wyverns muscled out only one person. They dragged him to a white-haired elf, announcing, "We killed one inside—it tried to run. This one is spell-marked, but it was with an oni."

It was Tommy Chang.

"Kill him," the male
domana
said.

"No!" Tinker plunged forward, forced her way through the towering Wyverns to Tommy's side. "Don't hurt him!"

The white-haired elf turned and Tinker gasped at the damage done to his face.

"Ah, what honest horror!" the half-blinded elf said. "You must be the child-bride. Not much to you—how did you come out in one piece?"

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"Because they underestimated me." Tinker tugged Tommy's arm out of the Wyvern's hold. "Look, he's been tested. He's not oni."

"He might be mixed blood," said the half-blinded elf.

"Who gives a flying fuck?" Tinker snarled in English.

"
Domi
," Stormsong murmured behind her.

"He's not one of them." Tinker switched back to High Elvish.

"How do you know?" Forest Moss asked. "From what I hear, the tengu fooled you."

She was not going to let them kill someone she knew. She stared at Tommy, trying to remember something that would prove he was what she thought he was—to herself as much as to them.

Maddeningly, he said nothing in his own defense, just stood there, wrapped in his bulletproof cool. Didn't he know that no one was swordproof?

True, she'd trusted Riki blindly, but she hadn't known oni existed, and had awarded him the trust she gave all strangers. Her world had been a different place not so long ago.

"I know because—" she started in order to stall them. Because she'd known Tommy half her life. His family had owned a restaurant in Oakland since before Startup. He'd been a driving force organizing the hoverbike racing, and most summers she saw him on a weekly basis. He wasn't a stranger. She wouldn't immediately say he was "good" people. He had a temper and a reputation of being ruthless when it came to business; that didn't make him any more evil than she was. She suspected the elves wouldn't accept those facts as a good argument for his humanity. Riki had proved her judgment was flawed.

What could she say as proof that these elves would accept? They were growing impatient for her answer.

"Because—" And then unexpectedly, Riki provided the answer. "Because when the tengu came looking for me, he didn't know where to find me."

That puzzled them, which was fine, as she needed to cram a lot into this argument to make it sound.

"Two years ago, Tommy bought a custom Delta hoverbike off me. He needed to write a check, and there were the pink slips—forms to show transfer of ownership for tax reasons. I told him my human name, which was Alexander Graham Bell." Which of course had triggered a round of teasing from
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Tommy, and occasionally afterward, he'd called her "Tinker Bell." "I even told him why I was called that." In truth, she had been trying to stem the teasing with a sympathy play since Tommy's mother had also been murdered. "And that my father was the man who invented the orbital gate. I told him—he didn't tell the oni."

That seemed to buy it for the Wyverns. They released their hold on Tommy.

Magic suddenly flared across her senses, like a gasoline pool catching flame. Tinker spun around but there was nothing to see. Forest Moss made a motion, and she turned to watch him call on the Stone Clan Spell Stones and use the magic to trigger his shields. Around them, the Wyverns and her Hand went alert.

"What was that? Did you feel that?" she asked Forest Moss.

"It was a spell breaking." Forest Moss cocked the fingers of his left hand and brought them to his mouth.

"Ssssstada."

The spell Forest Moss triggered was a variation of the ground radar. A long, narrow wedge of power formed from the male elf to the river's edge. He shifted his right hand, and the wedge swept northward through Chinatown. At the heart of Chinatown, he hit an intense writhing of power.

"How odd," Forest Moss said.

"What is that?" Tinker noted that Tommy, being smart, had vanished while they had been distracted.

Forest Moss gave her an odd look. "It's a ley scry. It lets me see recent and active disturbances in the ley lines. I don't know what it was supposed to do, but a spell was just violently altered, and it's now acting as a pump on a
fiutana
."

"Oh shit. The black willow."

The great doors of the refrigerated warehouse stood open to the summer heat. Magic flowed down over the loading dock in a purple haze of potential. Tinker cautiously pulled the Rolls around, trying to angle the car so they could see into the cave darkness, but the dock was too high, and the door, facing the afternoon eastern sky, was cave dark. Tinker flicked on the headlights, but even the high beams failed to illuminate the interior.

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"I want a closer look." Tinker put the Rolls into park. She wished she could leave the engine running, but it would be a mistake with this much free magic in the area.

She got out and the
sekasha
followed. Magic flooded over her, hot and fast. The heat tossed the chimes on the ley shrine, making them jangle in shrill alarm. A smell like burnt cinnamon mixed with a taste like heated honey. The invisible brilliance hinted at by the shimmering purple made her eyes water.

"Be careful." She blinked away tears. "The magic is all around us."

"Even we can see that." Stormsong's shields outlined her in hard, blue radiance. "Your shields,
domi
."

Yeah, now would be a good time for that.

Tinker set up a resonance with the spell stones and then triggered her shield spell. Once the winds were wrapped around her, she waded up the steps, making sure that she didn't disturb the spell by gesturing.

The padlock had been cut off with a bolt cutter. Her spell hadn't failed; someone had broken in and sabotaged it.

Violet sparkled and shifted in the black of the warehouse, casting patterns of shadows and near light.

Tinker couldn't see anything that looked like the black willow. Stormsong tried the lights, but the switch had no effect.

"The flood would have popped the lightbulbs." There was no way Tinker was going in there blind. "Do we have a light?"

"Yes." Pony took out a spell light, closed his left hand tight around the glass orb, and activated it. He played a thin beam of searchlight intensity over the room.

They had left the black willow tied down on pallets. The restraints now lay in tatters. Splinters of wood marked the pallets' destruction. The forklift sat upended like a child's toy. Dead leaves rode convection currents, dancing across the cement floor with a thin, dry skittering noise.

"Where is it?" Tinker whispered.

"I don't see it." Pony's eyes swept the room again.

"Neither do I." Tinker glanced back to the street. Where was Forest Moss? That ground radar thing
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would come in handy just about now. "Let's turn off the compressor and at least stop this flood."

They moved through the warehouse to the back room. The small windowless room was empty of trees, with only the purring compressor to wreak havoc. A crowbar lay across the metal tracings of her spell, encircled with charring. Odd distortions wavered around the compressor.

Cursing, she started for the breaker box.

"
Domi
, no!" Stormsong caught her shoulder and stilled her. "Stay here at the door. Let Cloudwalker do it."

"The willow isn't in here." Tinker nevertheless stayed at the door as Stormsong asked while Cloudwalker crossed to the breaker box and cut the power to the compressor. "See, no dan—"

Her only warning was the ominous rustle of leaves, and then the forklift struck her shield from behind.

She yelped, spinning around to see the forklift rebound back across the warehouse.

"Shields!" Stormsong shouted.

Tinker had let her shields drop in her surprise. She fumbled through the resonance setup as Pony's narrow light played off the suddenly close wizened "face" of the black willow. They had to have walked straight past it, somehow blind to it. It filled the warehouse now, blocking them from the door. It lifted a root-foot and replanted it with a booming sound that shook the floor. Its branches rattled as it blindly felt the confines of the room. A dozen of it's arms encountered the upended forklift, scooped it up again, and flung it at her.

Tinker snapped through the shield spell, already wincing, as the forklift sailed toward her. At the last second the winds wrapped tight around her and the forklift struck the distortion's edge.

"Shit!" Tinker swore as the forklift bounced back across the warehouse to wedge itself sidewises in the far door. "There's no other door, right?"

"No,
domi
," Pony said.

Tinker wasn't sure whether to be amazed or annoyed that Pony sounded so calm, as if she could pull doorways out of her butt. "Oh damn, oh damn, oh damn. Okay, I know I'm smarter than this tree."

The black willow lifted another root-foot and shook the world as it planted it back down, a few yards closer to them, instantly pulverizing the cement floor, digging roots down into the building's footing.

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"But I have some doubts," Tinker admitted, "that brains are going to win over brawn this time."

What did she have to work with? She scanned the room of bare concrete block as the willow stomped ponderously closer. Crowbar.
Boom!
Compressor. Five
sekasha
. Five
ejae
.
Boom!
Circuit breaker box.

"Stormsong, what do you know about electricity?" Tinker asked the most tech-savvy of her Hand.

"Nothing useful," Stormsong said.

Boom!

"Nothing?" Tinker squeaked.

"It lives in a box in the wall." Stormsong detailed what she knew. "It goes away if you don't pay for it."

Boom!

Right—nothing useful. Scratch having Stormsong rig an electrical weapon. Just as well, good chance they'd just electrocute themselves.