“Friendship is a rare beast in our line. Most people only fake it.”
“I don’t fake anything.”
“I’m starting to understand that.” His gaze made her blush because it seemed to suggest he was into tall blondes. Then again, most men were, at least at first meeting. Usually after they met her father’s ghost, though, they realized that tall and blond only stretched so far.
“Tell me, who exactly is Tinker?” He nodded toward the televisions.
All three channels were covering the same story from slightly different perspectives. Jane swore as the details filtered in, painful in the familiar cadence, as if time had wound back eight years. Vanished without a trace. No witnesses. Missing since yesterday. Jumpfish and river sharks made finding a body unlikely.
“Oh, God.” The cameras of the news crews picked out all the same trappings as when Boo disappeared. The police cars. The EIA river patrol boats. The family waiting on the shore for news. The only difference this time was that it was elves gathered into a protective circle. The viceroy’s face was full of unbearable grief.
“You know him?” Taggart asked.
“Her. Tinker is a girl.” Not much older than what Boo would be now, if Boo was still alive. “Everyone knows her. She’s famous.” Jane thought of all the photos of the muddy hoverbike racer that they had sent Network. In every one of them, Tinker had blazed glorious. Determined in battle. Joyous at her wins. Grinning even in defeat.
“I’m sorry,” Taggart said quietly, and Jane realized that there was a tear rolling down her cheek.
“I don’t really know her.” Jane wiped at her face. “She’s just eighteen; she’s still just a kid.” According to certain juvenile betting pools, Tinker had barely started to date before meeting the viceroy. “But Pittsburgh is a small town. Everyone has dozens of points of commonality. My cousins are on her crew. My younger brother hangs out with her cousin. My mechanic’s little brother is her best friend.”
The impending ripple of grief moving through the city, touching everyone, made Jane’s throat tighten up. She focused instead on the chaos on the screen trying to understand when and where Tinker had disappeared. Last Jane had heard, Tinker had been building something out beyond the Rim. How had she disappeared with all those people at her beck and call? She wasn’t a first grader with five older brothers to distract everyone. Tinker might be barely five foot tall but her personality expanded to fill the room. Jane had noticed that any time she’d crossed paths with Tinker, everyone in the area had tracked her movement.
Maddeningly none of the three reporters were actually covering what had happened. Chloe Polanski hated working with a crew (and from what Jane had heard, the feeling was mutual) and used an eyepiece camera. Her shots were either close-ups of herself or confusing sweeps of the river. The woman was good for interviews but sucked when there wasn’t a warm body to tear into pieces. Kimberly Shotts was going for the human-interest angle and her cameraman stayed focused on the viceroy. Only Mark Webster’s cameraman was showing enough of the surroundings for Jane to get her bearings as to where the elves and humans were gathering. They seemed to be at the old Greyhound parking lot off of Second Avenue, about six hundred feet from the footings of the 10th Street Bridge.
Jane swore as Mark’s camera showed the wreckage of Tinker’s famous hoverbike in the emergency pull-off lane of 376, just feet from the Monongahela River. “What the hell did she hit?”
As if to answer her, the camera panned upwards to the Boulevard of the Allies at the top of the cliff beside Second Avenue. The drop from the highway above was straight down several hundred feet.
“Looks like she went off the cliff,” Taggart said.
“Not by accident,” Jane said. “She could make a hoverbike do anything. She could fly…”
Jane realized that Mark was showing the edge of Mercy Hospital. “Oh, freaking hell.”
She scrambled to her camera charging station. She’d swapped out memory cards before stowing her camera in the truck. If Hal had actually recorded anything yesterday, it would be the only thing on the fresh card.
The first thing was Hal’s “call” to the studio. She had missed out on him thanking her profusely for her promise to come and get him.
“Thank you, Jane. You wonderful, wonderful girl. A true goddess! You magnificent Valkyrie! I love you…”
She hit fast forward, swearing softly, as she started to burn with embarrassment because Taggart had followed her from the televisions.
“Is that your main camera?”
“It’s our only camera.”
“That ancient thing? I thought you were the top show.”
“Welcome to Pittsburgh,” she growled. The truth was that Hal killed too many cameras to let PB&G have the newer equipment, not that what Mark’s crew were using could be consider state of the art. Jane paused as she found Hal’s “big bird.” Hal wasn’t the best cameraman so it blurred in and out of focus. At first the scale was impossible to judge until a hoverbike suddenly soared out into the air near it. The rider and bike separated even as they both plunged toward the ground.
Jane gasped in horror. The rider was Tinker. Falling.
The black bird dove and caught Tinker in midair. Only did then the size of the creature become obvious. It was huge.
“What is that?” Taggart asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen a bird this big.”
“Is it a bird?”
“I don’t think it’s a wyvern. Its wings look feathered. Wyverns are lizardlike with batwings.”
“Are you sure?”
“There’s a wyvern stuffed in the Carnegie Museum, just down the hall from the dinosaurs. Every other year in school we went there for a field trip because there’s not much else to see in Pittsburgh.”
Tinker thrashed in the bird’s hold and then went heart-stoppingly limp. The black bird flapped away. Hal attempted to keep the bird in sight with zoom and things blurred in and out of focus again.
Swearing, Jane pulled the chip out of the camera and slotted it into her home video editor. She flipped through the frames until she found the cleanest shot of the creature.
“Does that look like a winged man to you?” Jane said.
“What exactly do these oni look like?”
“Tall. Strong. Red haired. No one said anything about wings.”
“So there’s another player in town.”
Jane cursed, dropping F bombs, and she found the clearest picture of Tinker being caught by the winged man and sent it to her printer. “They’re searching the river for her body and she never went into the water.”
“Congrats on the scoop.”
“Scoop, hell.” Jane snatched the picture off the printer. “We’re telling her family what really happened to her.”
“Really?” He looked surprised and pleased by the news.
Jane pointed across the room at the center television where the camera dwelled on the viceroy’s open grief. “He thinks his bride went into a river full of man-eating fish. If anyone should know that Tinker was still alive, it should be him.”
It was like having two children in the car with her. Okay, one child and a young adult that kept backsliding. Hal was attempting to prove he was really only eight years old. Taggart could resist the taunting part of the time. Nigel was the senile grandmother who never noticed that the children were fighting. He sat in the backseat, smiling serenely at the passing landscape. What made things worse was that Taggart called shotgun so he could film through the front window. That made it so she couldn’t reach Hal to swat him into silence. She found herself tempted to hit Taggart just because he was beside her. And because he’d changed into a dark blue silk shirt and cologne that smelled so good she just wanted to roll in it.