There seemed to be a rule that when her Hand was working, only her First was allowed to talk freely. “Domi wouldn’t be able to call her shields inside the Rolls,” Pony explained. “Cars are easy to disable. You must always consider them as a possible trap, especially in confined spaces like the tunnels.”
Blue Sky nodded his understanding, now eyeing the tunnel warily. “So, how do we get the lights on?”
“Trial and error,” Tinker said. Hopefully “error” didn’t involve death and mayhem.
“Are you sure this is okay?” Blue Sky asked while he filmed her picking the lock on the access door. Someone had been serious about keeping people out; there were two deadbolts on the heavy steel door. “Shouldn’t we call someone first?”
“I’m the Wind Clan domi. I can do whatever needs to be done.” At least, that was what being domi seemed to entail. She was still trying to figure out the limits of her power. So far, it was easier to plow on ahead instead of trying to track down someone that could verify if she had authority or not.
“But — but this belongs to the city, not the Wind Clan.” Blue tapped the faded words stenciled on the steel door that read AUTHORIZED PERSONAL ONLY in English. “We should call. . someone.”
Blue was always such a morally straight arrow. When they were kids together, he was the one that kept her out of trouble. She could talk her cousin Oilcan into anything, no matter how crazy dangerous, but Blue was an immovable rock, sticking firmly to the rules his older brother had laid down. The elves thought of the sekasha as holy because they had been created perfect in every way. The warriors were considered above flawed laws made by flawed elves. It was weird to think that Blue’s moral compass was genetically based.
“It was the city’s,” Tinker said. “According to the treaty, though, anything left on Elfhome after the gate failed would become the Wind Clan’s.”
Blue Sky made a face at the news. Raised by his human brother, Blue thought of himself as a Pittsburgher first and foremost. “Does that include people?”
“Humans are considered neutral at the moment,” Pony said. “Clan alliance cannot be assigned, it must be chosen. It is the only way you can pledge your loyalty and be true to it.”
The cylinders of the second lock clicked into place and the door unlocked.
Stormsong stepped past Tinker and pushed the door open. It swung open to reveal a cavernous garage. Tinker noticed for the first time that Stormsong was wearing button-fly blue jeans instead of black leather pants. The rivets and buttons were done with ironwood instead of steel that would have messed up the sekasha’s protective spells. They were very much the female warrior’s style, matching her blue dyed short hair.
“I could have gotten it,” Tinker grumbled.
“I’m just doing my job.” Stormsong tucked Tinker’s right arm into the sling that Tinker had been ignoring. “You’re going to have to be careful or you’ll break it again.”
“I’m not made of glass,” Tinker complained.
Stormsong laughed. “I think you’ve proven that but for the next few weeks, it would be better if you pretended that you were. The bone has healed but it’s still bruised and fragile.”
Pony put a hand on Tinker’s shoulder. “Domi, let the Blades go first.”
What did they think was going to be locked inside the garage? Then again, this was Elfhome. She stepped aside to let the sekasha search.
The tunnels had a surprisingly complex and extensive control room for two cement-lined holes nearly a century old. Beyond the switches for nearly a mile of lights, there were also controls for a massive ventilation system and a fairly new monitoring array. Tinker flicked on the lights, powered on the cameras and scanned the screens.
A 1953 Pennsylvania Department of Highways report stated that the tunnels were driven through “poor ground” as they were being dug and that extensive reinforcements were put into place to make them safe. Between what happened to Turtle Creek and the war with the invading oni, it was possible that the tunnels were no longer safe to navigate. Before they started fiddling with the fundamental nature of reality, Tinker wanted to test the tunnels’ support beams for stress fractures.
At first glance, the passages seemed undamaged. Then she noticed the small lumps on the pavement near the halfway point in both tunnels.
“What are those? Did part of the ceiling collapse?” Tinker played with the video controls. She found the zoom feature and panned over the objects. They were obviously not part of the tunnel. They were some kind of device, fairly simple in design — seemingly nothing more than a stack of bricks with wires sticking out of them — but she couldn’t recognize any of the individual pieces accept an obvious tripwire that stretched across both lanes of the tunnels. “What the hell are they?”
“Something bad,” Stormsong said.
Tinker turned to look at the female when nothing more was forthcoming.
Stormsong shook her head. “I don’t know what they are, but my talent says that they’re very dangerous.”
Elves described magic as the power to render things down to possibilities and reshape them. The intanyai seyosa was an entire caste who had been bioengineered to take “educated guess” to scary levels. Stormsong’s mother was the queen’s oracle and the female sekasha had inherited some of her mother’s talent. If Stormsong said the objects were dangerous, then they were.
Tinker studied the twin machines. The tripwires were connected to a cylindrical object about three inches long that was inserted into what looked like blocks of white molding clay. Tripwire. Clay. Tinker suddenly realized what she was looking at.
“Shit! They’re bombs.” Tinker pushed the elves toward the door. The tunnels would direct most of the force of the explosion laterally, but there was no telling what would happen once the tunnels collapsed. “Everyone out. Out!”
“Our shields are not strong enough to protect us from bombs.” Stormsong caught Tinker by the good arm and made sure Tinker followed them out.
“I figured that,” Tinker said. The spells tattooed onto the sekasha were meant to counteract other sekasha’s attacks; their protective shields could only deal with swords, normal arrows, and to a limited extent, bullets. Tinker’s domana shielding spell was nearly impenetrable, but penetrating was only the start of the forces at play.
“Your shield won’t keep you from being buried if the roof comes down,” Stormsong continued.
“I fully understand the physics involved,” Tinker snapped. “I’m not going to do something stupid.”
They did an odd mutual herding back to the cars, and then they milled about at the — possibly — safe distance.
“So what do we do?” Blue Sky asked.
Tinker took out her phone. “Find someone that knows about bombs.”
The director of the EIA answered his phone with a barked, “Maynard.”
“I have bombs in the Squirrel Hill Tunnels,” Tinker told him.
There was a long pause, and then Maynard asked in overly polite High Elvish. “Tinker ze domi, why are you going to blow up the tunnels?”
“What? Me? No! Someone else put them there; I’ve just found the stupid things.”
“Oh, okay,” and then Maynard leapt to the same conclusion as Stormsong. “Oh please God, tell me you’re not trying to disarm them.”
Tinker sighed. Why did everyone think she’d try? The only things she knew about bombs came from movies — which boiled down to cutting colored wire before a timer ran out — and a few childhood experiments with ANFO. Her experiments had been very educational on the destructive nature of explosives and how they could go wrong. “I’m not! I need someone to come get rid of them.”