Wolf eyed the wires snaking away to either end of the bridge. “Do you have more than one?”
“Three. I tried to get four, but these babies are hard to find in Pittsburgh — and a bitch to move. They weigh nearly two hundred pounds and then you need almost four hundred pounds of ballast so they don’t tip over. I put the other two on either hill to get maximum spread.”
Tinker settled at the table at the center of the bridge. “I’ve got them tied together to this control board. I’m trying to track down a manual on—” she paused to eye her screen closely. “Ah, there, Morse code.”
Wolf crouched beside her. “You’re going to use the light to communicate?”
She smiled and leaned down to touch her forehead to his. “Exactly. By the composition of the buildings inside the Ghostlands, it’s clear that Earth is one of the dimensions intersected by this discontinuity. The blue shift of the area seems to indicate that certain spectrums of light are being absorbed and only the blue is reflecting back to us.”
“So other spectrums are traveling on through to the other dimensions?”
“I think so. If we communicate with Earth, we might be able to get them to help. I’m just a little worried that no one on their end will be paying attention — this will only work in the middle of night.”
“They’re missing a city with sixty thousands souls. They’re paying attention.”
“Well — there is that.” She kissed him and went back to work.
“Have you considered that the oni will see this too?”
“Yes, I know, that’s a flaw in the plan. We’ll have to consider any communication from another world as suspect.”
He considered this problem as she typed. “It is unfortunate that the EIA had been compromised. Maynard might have had a way to verify any communication from the U.N. is authentic.”
“Hmmm, hadn’t considered that angle. Human agencies that have security protocols. Wait — I wonder — what happened to those NSA agents?”
“The human agents that tried to kidnap you?”
His tone made her glance at him and giggle. “Oh don’t look like that. They only wanted to protect me from the oni. They actually were nice, once they stopped trying to drag me back to Earth.”
“Maynard will know where they are, if they are in Pittsburgh.”
She took out a cell phone and made it beep repeatedly. “I would have never dreamed having the God of Pittsburgh’s phone number in my address book.”
“He is not God of Pittsburgh. He is our servant.”
“Somehow I doubt that he sees it that way.” Her face changed as the call went through. “Oh, hi, yeah, this is Tinker. Say, do you know what happened to the NSA agents? Briggs and Durrack? Really?” She listened for a moment. “Oh cool! Can you send them out to Turtle Creek? I need them out here. Thanks.”
As she hung up, Wolf wondered what Maynard made of the phone call. It was a perfect example, though, of his domi’s leadership skills. She saw the need and did what was needed to fill it without guidance from him. All she needed was the authority of her title. And she probably did not realize how rare the ability was.
“They didn’t leave last Shutdown, so they’re stuck here.” She relayed what she learned. “They’ve been working with him. Apparently when they kidnapped me, he put them through a detailed background check. They’re one of the few people in Pittsburgh he could trust to be who they said they were. He was using them to weed through the EIA’s databases to find altered files and recover the original data.”
Her walkie-talkie beeped and one of the work crews reported in that the other two searchlights were in place and pointed down into the valley. The walkie-talkies tickled him to no end. That was what he wanted for his people — the ease of communication that humans had.
Tinker glanced up into the night sky. Full dark lay full on the land and the stars gleamed brilliant overhead. “What do you think? Is it dark enough?”
“It will not get any darker without clouds.”
“These lights are about two hundred times brighter than a normal light bulb,” Tinker warned him. “You shouldn’t look directly at them when they’re on. Okay, let’s see if it works.” Tinker radioed the other two units with “Turn them on.”
The three beams of light cut brilliant down into the valley. Mid-way the light shifted to blue, somewhat muted, but still dazzling in the pitch darkness.
“Hmm, that’s a good sign.” Tinker murmured.
“Did you plan tonight because of the lack of moon?” Wolf asked.
“I’d love to say yes, but actually we just got lucky.” Tinker clicked her keyboard, activating her program. The searchlights started to flash. “I’ve written a short script in Morse code — C-Q-C-Q-C-Q-D-E-S-1-K — and interspersed it with three minutes of darkness.”
“What does that mean?”
“This manual says it means ‘calling any station this is designation station one, listening.’ I’m not sure if that’s totally correct Morse, but I figure its close enough for horseshoes.”
She saw his smile, and her eyes widened as she realized what she said, and then she smiled too. He’d asked her to be his domi after playing horseshoes with her.
The searchlights snapped off, plunging them into darkness, and Tinker slid down into his lap.
“Did you—” Tinker whispered to him. “Did you have lovers other than Jewel Tears — and the sekasha?”
“A few. Not many. I had my insane ideas of coming to the Westernlands and establish a holding here.”
She made a small unhappy sound.
“If I had known you were in my future, I would have waited,” he whispered. “Think, this way I came to you a skilled lover. This way one of us knew how it was done.”
“I can build a hypergate jump gate, I’m sure I could have figured sex out. Insert Tab M into Slot F. Repeat until done.”
Windwolf laughed. “You delight me.”
“Good. You delight me too.”
Wolf considered the steep hills of the valley and the Ghostland below. “All things considered, I think we better strengthen our position. We’re going to stir the oni up doing this.”
Tinker looked up with surprise. “Oh! I hadn’t considered that.”
He was learning that his domi became so fixated on a puzzle that she ignored the outside world. It meant that she could lock all of her brilliance onto finding a solution, but it left her open to being blindsided.
“I will take care of it.” He stood up and kissed her brow.
The NSA agents arrived in their sleek grey sedan was so out of place in Pittsburgh that it didn’t need the D.C. plates to identify it as out of town. Nobody drove new cars because the parts were too hard to find, and no one knew how to service them. Corg Durrack and Hannah Briggs got out of the car cautiously, as if they were trying not to spook the heavily-armed elves.
Both NSA agents though looked like they could hold their own with the sekasha.
The tall, leggy Briggs wore her clingy black outfit that looked like wet paint, and slid in and out of the shadows with feline grace. A Batman utility belt with small mystery packs had been added to her ensemble, slung low on her hips, holstering her exotic long barreled handgun. Tinker couldn’t tell if Briggs was now flaunting her weapon, or just displaying the one that was impossible to conceal.
Corg Durrack had a boyish face and the body of a comic book hero. He carried his usual peace offering of a white wax paper bag, which he held out Tinker with grin. “Your favorite.”
“I’ll be the judge.” Tinker opened to the bag to find her favorite cookies — chocolate frosting thumbprint cookies from Jenny Lee. “This is spooky. How did you know?”