That’s exactly what Tinker was doing, but she didn’t want everyone in Pittsburgh knowing that. Tinker sighed at Chloe’s predatory smile. “You really like your job?”
“Love it.” Chloe’s smile broaden. “I get to corner people, ask them all sorts of embarrassing questions and watch them squirm.”
Tinker tried to keep her temper but it was fraying fast. “If you keep pushing people’s buttons, someone is bound to push back.”
Chloe laughed. “It wouldn’t be good for morale if Pittsburgh’s favorite field reporter was chopped into little bits while reporting live. So, be a dear, and smile and tell Aunty Chloe everything.”
Completely the wrong thing for Chloe to say. It triggered all sorts of other things that Tinker didn’t want to be thinking about. How her previously anonymous mother had nearly driven her insane. How her pseudo-mother had turned out to be her real aunt. How Tinker had totally lost it all on a dark road and gotten an old friend killed.
“You are not my aunt,” Tinker growled, suddenly too frustrated to be nice. “And this conversation is over.”
And all the sekasha kicked into overdrive, spearheaded by Stormsong. One moment the warriors were flanking Tinker, ignoring the conversation to give her the illusion of privacy. The next, they were between Tinker and Chloe with swords out.
“Don’t kill her!” Tinker ordered in Elvish, afraid that they would do just that.
Stormsong snatched the headset off Chloe. “I know how irreplaceable this is.” Stormsong held it out of Chloe’s reach. “Either you take yourself and it away from here, or I’ll grind it into pieces.”
“Fine. I’ll go.” Chloe tucked away the headset after Stormsong handed it back. “My boss has been texting me for the last five minutes to go cover the keva handouts.”
Chloe had a hoverbike tucked into the shadows of the inbound tunnel. The mystery of how Chloe reached the abandoned highway was solved. She raced the motor, making it roar defiantly before taking off.
“I have never liked that woman.” Stormsong watched Chloe speed off, her hand still on her hilt.
“Neither have I,” Tinker said.
The “us versus her” lasted mere minutes after the sound of Chloe’s engines died in the distances. Then everything clicked back to normal. Tinker’s right arm ached dully, her temper was frayed, the sekasha scattered out to find hidden evil ninjas, and Blue went back to pouting. When they were growing up together, Blue always looked like his brother John to Tinker. Now she could only see the Wind Clan sekasha stamp on him — the black hair, the blue eyes, and the tendency to glower.
“They won’t come out and say it.” Blue glared at her borrowed Hand as they checked the ironwood trees growing beside the bridge for strangle vines and steel spinners. “But they don’t want me to be a Blade. They’re all scared something will jump out and eat me.”
“It’s entirely possible something could,” Tinker said. “We’re at the Rim.”
Blue Sky huffed like he was going to argue the point. At one time, “the Rim” meant only the line of destruction where the transfer between worlds shattered everything at the edge down to elementary particles. On one side of the line was Pittsburgh urban sprawl and on the other was virgin Elfhome forest. Over time, though, Elfhome’s deadly flora and fauna had pushed inward, sometimes by several miles. Pittsburghers now considered the Rim to be where the dangerous Elfhome vegetation started.
“So what am I supposed to do?” Blue scuffed the pavement with his boot. “It’s not like I can be a Shield; I don’t have spells or a sword and my bow is useless at close range. Besides, you have the great wall of kick butt.”
Tinker understood completely. She could outthink just about anyone in Pittsburgh, but she was vulnerable to brute psychical force, especially when applied rapidly. It was always annoying to know that ninety percent of her enemies could simply pick her up and carry her off. The current record of being “carried off” stood at four if you counted the black willow tree, which hadn’t so much carried her off as flung her halfway across the city.
Dealing with Chloe had at least made it easy to think of something Blue Sky could do. “You know your way around tech though.” She led him back to the Roll Royce and dug through the backseat that had become the catchall for her toys. “You can help me take measurements and stuff.”
“Measuring what?” Blue took her camera and flicked it on and checked the battery power.
“The tunnels.” Tinker waved a hand toward the absolute black of the twin tunnel entrances. The black holes created eyes for a skull-like building abutting the foot of the steep hillside. Between the two tunnels, a tall garage door completed the skeleton grin; a steel grate broke the white door into rows of teeth.
“Okay.” Blue took three steps toward the inbound tunnel before she managed to catch him by the collar and haul him back.
“After we get the lights on,” Tinker said.
Once upon a time, “Skull Mountain” wouldn’t have fazed Tinker. She would have plunged into the tunnels without a second thought. Sure, she would have known that the solid darkness within the nearly mile-long tunnels could hide virtually anything: collapsed ceilings, rifts in time and space, man-eating trees, frost-breathing wargs, or even just machine gun wielding oni. She would have naively assumed that her intelligence would carry the day. After tearing a rift in the fabric of space and time as a side effect of single-handedly thwarting an army of oni, falling off the planet, and other odd and painful misadventures, Tinker was starting to be a little more cautious. Her life wasn’t the only one on the line; wherever she went, her Hand would be bound and determined to follow. Worse now Blue would be caught up in the danger.
Blue obviously knew he was part of the reason she was being cautious and he didn’t like it. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”
“I want to get the lights before I start anything.” Assuming they could get Impatience to cooperate. To be completely fair, it wasn’t clear if the little dragon knew that she needed his help. So far she hadn’t been able to pin him down with translator in tow. He’d spent the last week drifting unfettered about Pittsburgh, walking through walls and whatnot, scaring everyone from Ralph at Eide’s Entertainment to the counter help at Jenny’s bakery.
She got a headache every time she just thought about the upcoming work. “I need to get a hyperactive dragon — that only tengu can communicate with — to build a pathway to Earth using work crews of elves that don’t speak English and humans that barely speak Elvish. I’m not going to do that in the dark.”
Speaking of language barriers, they were still speaking English which only Stormsong understood, although Pony had been working hard to learn. Tinker switched to Elvish. “I thought the tunnels would be lit. There are lights in Fort Pitt and Liberty Tunnels.”
Blue sighed, obviously wishing they’d stayed in English, but spoke Elvish in reply. “Those tunnels go someplace.”
“Technically, Squirrel Hill does too.” When Pittsburgh used to return to Earth for one day each month — before she stranded the city permanently on Elfhome — I-376 was routinely reattached to its severed half so that it once again lead to Monroeville. There was only a sliver of actual city beyond the steep hill, though, and it had been largely abandoned over the years. Man-eating trees, frost-breathing wargs and machine gun wielding oni had that effect on suburban life.
The there-but-not-there status of the largely unused tunnel made it perfect for the project.
“Why don’t we use the cars to light them up?” Blue pointed the camera at the three big gray luxury sedans.