Crow Boy sprang up into the air, unfurling his wings with a loud rustle. He labored upward, the flapping growing quieter as he rose.
Something wrapped itself around Louise’s neck. She jumped, reaching for her throat in alarm.
“Hungry,” Joy complained from under her chin.
“Joy!” Louise whispered loudly. “You scared me!”
Joy blew a raspberry. “Mine!”
This seemed to be to the giant birds eyeing Louise closely. The moa rumbled and clacked their beaks and stomped their feet.
Crow Boy landed lightly beside her carrying Jillian.
“That’s just like being Peter Pan again!” Jillian said. “I love flying! I wish I had wings.”
“You would need more than just wings to fly,” Crow Boy said.
“It would help,” Jillian muttered.
It made Louise think of the babies who may or may not have bird bones and feet. Chuck Norris would want to be able to fly. Probably the Jawbreakers too. Nikola would want to be like his sisters. What were they going to do with the babies if they turned out to be tengu? Perhaps Orville was right to worry. “Will the eggs be okay? Unattended?”
“The incubator has an alarm on it,” Crow Boy said. “If the power fails or the eggs get too hot, several adults will be notified. We only have a short period of time before the nest mothers who turn the eggs show up and notice that you are gone.”
Louise nodded in understanding. If they wanted to keep things secret from the tengu — and thus the elves — they needed to move quickly.
Crow Boy had called it “a storage shed” but the structure looked more like a concrete bunker tucked under a hill. Most of the building was covered with earth and what looked like undisturbed forest detritus. Large ferns grew in strategic pockets to disguise vents. The heavy steel door was painted to match the dead leaves. The entire structure seemed invisible in the faint light of the elf shines that danced in the area. Despite the camouflage, the door had a number-pad keylock. Crow Boy punched in the code, opened the door, and turned on the lights. The interior was larger than Louise expected, with a Quonset hut high-arched roofline.
The tengu had recovered all of the twins’ supplies but had simply dropped them in one large pile in the center of the floor.
When she and Jillian planned the rescue of the nestlings, they’d loaded down the luggage mules with everything they thought they would need to escape to Elfhome. They hadn’t given much thought on what would come afterwards.
It was “afterward.” What did they need?
They’d brought a stunning amount of stuff. The food was long gone but everything else made a small mountain to sort through. Solar rechargers. Power strips. Survival blankets. Tools. Nonlethal weapons like Tasers and pepper spray. Signal repeaters. Spare tablets. Small 3D printers. Supplies for casting magic. A monster whistle. Hundreds upon hundreds of robotic mice. A fleet of luggage mules to haul it all.
The twins started to dig through the mound without a plan. They slowed down to a crawl, defaulting to dividing things into piles, hoping that organization would trigger inspiration.
Louise finally sat down in despair. Where did they even really start? What were they supposed to do? They were two nine-year-old orphans on a foreign planet against an army. They had broken toys and ancient magic that they didn’t fully understand.
“Let’s recharge everything that can hold a charge,” Jillian said after standing still for several minutes, thinking. “That way if we find that we need something, it’s ready to go.”
“I can do that.” Crow Boy picked up a power strip and plugged it into the building’s only outlet.
“We can do this,” Jillian said. “We’re smarter—”
“Than the average bear,” Louise said dryly.
“Bear. Oni. Human. We’re smarter than everyone.”
“With a brain the size of a planet,” Louise quoted from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
“And you can see the future.” Jillian gestured at Louise with one of the robotic mice. “You knew the moment that the hyperphase gate failed that Esme was saving Jin Wong. No one could have just guessed at that one. Jin Wong went through the gate the first time that the Chinese turned it on. Esme left years later. Both of them were thought to be five light-years away. You knew.”
“I don’t know now,” Louise whispered.
“Yes, you do. ‘Youngest to the oldest, Brilliance must stand against the darkness.’ That’s us! You and me and Alexander and maybe even Orville. We’re the great-great-great-grandchildren of Unbounded Brilliance.”
“‘Heed the words written by the father.’” Louise repeated what seemed to be a key phrase in the prophecy. She remembered her dream of Alexander — Tinker domi—talking about her doctored version of the Codex. “It has to be something that Unbounded Brilliance wrote.”
Louise found one of the spare tablets that didn’t have a dead battery. Esme had left them a digital copy of the Dufae Codex. It had been on an ancient memory stick inside a Chinese puzzle box. The twins had copied the journal onto all their devices. Louise flipped through the spell book.
“Maybe,” Jillian said with less certainty. “The word ‘father’ might have meant Leonardo Dufae. He made the gate that started this mess. Maybe he kept a diary too.”
Louise shook her head. “No, Sparrow delivered Dufae’s box to her partners in crime. They have the nactka. The oni plan to use them to do something horrible. Unbounded Brilliance knew what they planned; it’s why he didn’t just hand the box over to his parents after he stole it. He had a plan to counter the oni.”
“Stupid plan,” Jillian muttered. “He should have just opened up all the nactka and freed the baby dragons.”
If Louise had known what was in the nactka, that’s what she would have done. Twelve Joys would have been impossible to keep hidden but that was because Earth had no magic. Unbounded Brilliance had been on Elfhome when he stole the box. Why hadn’t he just opened them? Three universes would have been vastly different if he had. “We wouldn’t exist if Dufae hadn’t been in France to meet our great-great-great-grandmother.”
“Yay for us, but Unbounded Brilliance wouldn’t have been killed in the Revolution. He would still be alive now. The baby dragons would be free. The oni wouldn’t have the box to do whatever they’re going to do with it. And this book is thousands of pages long! How are we going to find what we’re looking before it’s too late?” Jillian’s voice quavered with fear.
Louise felt a flutter of it in her stomach. “We’ll figure it out.” They had to. “Okay. Let’s back up and rethink this.”
“You don’t think ‘father’ means Unbounded Brilliance? You just said—”
“Wait! You’re Unbounded Brilliance. You find out that the enemy has the nactka and plan to do something with them.”
“It would help to know who he stole them off of.”
According to Louise’s dream about Tinker, the box originally belonged to Iron Mace, who tried to kill Oilcan just a few days ago. Iron Mace didn’t know that the box had been recovered by Sparrow; he was just a tool, used and then abandoned. It was possible that Unbounded Brilliance realized that his uncle wasn’t the real enemy.
“Maybe Unbounded didn’t know.” Louise felt her way through what might have happened hundreds of years ago. “He sees his uncle’s spell-locked box. A box that most people don’t know how to open without the key word or phrase. Unbounded picked the lock because he’s curious and clever. Inside, he found a dozen bombs. Think about it. You find several doomsday devices. You don’t know who made it or how it works or, most importantly, if there are more of them somewhere else. The box belongs to your uncle so you don’t know who you can even trust with this information. Instead of destroying the bombs, you—”