“Domi,” Pony said quietly behind her. “What are we looking for here?”
“My grandfather created the spell at the ice cream factory. I need to find his notes on it so I can fix it quickly. I figure it’s in one of these boxes.”
Pony nodded, looking undaunted by the task. “How can we help?”
Backing out of the whole tree mess wasn’t really an option; she already had too many people involved. The dust, however, was making her nose itch.
“Can you take these boxes out to the parking pad?” She waved toward the square of sun-baked cement. “After I look through a box, you can put it back.”
The first box she opened was actually some of their old racing gear. Inside were a dozen of their FRS walkie-talkies, heavily shielded against magic. She’d upgraded the team to earbuds, and mothballed the handheld radios.
“Score!” she cried. “This is just what I wanted!”
“What are they?” Pony picked one up. “Phones?”
“Close. I want to make it so the Hands can communicate over distance better. These are a little bit clunky but they’re easy to use.”
Oddly, Stormsong thought this was funny. She took the box, saying mysteriously, “This should be interesting.”
Tinker supposed it could be worse. Her grandfather had been methodical in organizing his things. Oilcan kept everything carefully separated as he packed the boxes. Still she couldn’t find anything filed under Reinholds, Refrigeration, Ice Cream, or the type of compressor that Reinholds used.
“Ze domi,” Stormsong murmured politely.
Tinker sighed. Random searching wasn’t going to work. “What is it, Stormsong?”
“I want to thank you for yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” Tinker found the Aa-Ak box and sat down beside it. “Can you put these boxes in alphabetical order?”
Stormsong started to rearrange the boxes, but switched to English, losing her polite mask. “Look, little one, you’re a good kid — your heart is in the right place — so I guess I do have to thank you for that stupidity you pulled yesterday. If you hadn’t come back, I’d be dead. But I had made my peace with that — being sekasha is all about choosing your life and your death — so don’t ever pull that shit again. You really fucked up. When that thing hit you, you should have been so much dead meat — and would have been a huge waste — because you are a good kid. The kind I would have been happy dying to protect — do you understand?”
Tinker blinked at her for moment, before finding her voice. “I thought I figured out a way to kill it.”
“It wasn’t your place to kill it.”
“What? I lost at paper, scissors, stone?”
“You know what I hate about being a sekasha? It’s the domana. We sekasha spend our lives learning the best way to handle any emergency. We train and train and train — and then have to kowtow to some domana who is just winging it because they’ve got the big guns. Do you know what? Just because you’ve got the big brains, or the kick ass spells, doesn’t mean you know everything. Next fight, shut the fuck up and do what you’re told, or I’m going to bitch slap you.”
It took Tinker a moment to find her voice. “You know, I think I like you better when you speak Elvish.”
Stormsong laughed, “And I like you better when you speak English. You’re more human.”
Tinker controlled the urge to stick out her tongue. She deserved Stormsong’s criticism since she had screwed up. Still, she suddenly felt like crying. Oh joy. The last few weeks had left her rubbed raw. Instead, she pushed the Aa-Ak box toward Stormsong, saying, “I’m done with this one,” and moved on. At least, having had her say, Stormsong took the box away without comment.
Under “Birth” Tinker found birth certificates for everyone in the family but herself. She pulled Oilcan’s and had Stormsong put it in the car. Under “Dufae” she found the original Dufae Codex carefully sealed in plastic. She’d only worked with the scanned copy that her father made.
“Wow.” That too she pulled out and had put in the Rolls to take home with her. The next book started with E’s, and toward the back was a thick file folder marked simply: Esme. “What the hell?”
Tinker pried the file out of the box, flipped it open and found Esme Shanske looking back. She ruffled quickly through the file. It was all information on Esme. NASA bios. Newspaper clippings. Photographs. It threw her into sudden and complete confusion.
“What are you doing here?” She asked Esme’s photo. “I wasn’t looking for you. What was I looking for?” She had to think a moment before remembering that she wanted to find her grandfather’s notes on the spell at Reinholds so the walk-in freezer could function again so she could store the black willow. But why? “Why am I doing this again?”
Lain wanted the black willow (thus the whole reason it was salvaged in the first place) and it might revive — good reason to lock the tree in the cooler. The cooler was broken. She needed to fix it. They were all nice, sane, and logical links in a chain.
What made it all weird were her dreams and Esme popping up in odd places. It jarred hard with Tinker’s orderly conception of reality. It pushed her into an uncomfortable feeling that the world wasn’t as solid and fixed as she thought it was. She wanted to ignore it all, but Windwolf had said that it wasn’t wise to ignore her dreams.
Perhaps if she dealt with them in a scientific manner, they wouldn’t seem so — frighteningly weird.
She got her datapad and settled in the sun to write out what she remembered of the dream, and what had already materialized. The pearl necklace headed the list, since it was the first to appear. Second was the black willow and the ice cream. She considered the hedgehogs of the dream and the flamingoes in the book’s illustrations and decided her future might be decidedly weird.
And who was the Asian woman in black? She felt that the woman had to be tengu because of the crows. She had felt, however, that she knew the woman, just as she knew Esme. Perhaps she was another colonist, which was why the birds kept repeating, “Lost.” Riki had told her that the first ship was crewed by tengu. Then it hit her — Riki lied about everything. She flopped back onto the sun warm cement and covered her eyes. Gods, what was she doing? Trying to apply logic to dream symbols was not going to work! So how was she going to figure out the future with only dreams and possible lies?
“Domi,” Pony’s voice and the touch of his hand on her face yanked Tinker out of her nightmare. “Wake up.”
Tinker opened her eyes and struggled awake. She lay on the warm, rough cement of the parking pad. Stormsong was doing a leisurely prowl in the alley. Pony knelt beside her, sheltering her from the sun. She groaned and rubbed at her eyes; they burned with unshed tears. “What is it?”
“You were having a nightmare.”
She grunted and sat up, not wanting to fall back to sleep, perhaps to dream. Lately dreaming was a bitch. The oni had really force-fed her id some whoppers, not that her imagination really needed it, no thank you.
“Domi?” His dark eyes mirrored the concern in his murmured question. “Are you all right?”
“It was just a bad dream.” She yawned so deep her face felt like it would split in half. “How can I sleep and wake up more tired?”
“You’ve only been asleep for a few minutes.” He shifted so that he sat beside her. “Nor was it restful sleep.”