For some reason — whether is was because Tinker missed the event, or because she was the ultimate outsider as an elf, or because she had magically appeared — the astronauts started to tell her their stories. They gone through a harrowing experience, filled with confusion, death, lucky chances, small miracles, and a great deal of heroics. At the core of it all was Esme, riding roughshod over rules and logic, ruthless in purpose, making one lucky guess after another. Esme, everyone agreed, forged a miracle, salvaging what should have been complete disaster.
Even Esme opened up to Tinker when they found themselves alone together. “One summer, while I was in college, I went to visit my older sister on Elfhome. Two months on another world — it seemed like exotic vacation. Then the dreams started — like I had some third eye that had been forced open and I was made to see. Some of what I had to do was so very clear, like changing my master’s degree to astrophysics and applying to NASA. Some of it was — blind faith — that it would matter. Somehow.”
“I hate to tell you this, but I have no idea how to help you beyond this.”
“This buys me time, which is what I needed most, Scarecrow” Esme scowled at her screens. “It gives me a chance to figure out what the fuck to do next.”
“Don’t call me Scarecrow. I rented the movie and watched it. Everyone in that movie was a dysfunctional idiot.”
“You didn’t read the books? The scarecrow is the wisest being in Oz and rules the kingdom after the wizard and Dorothy leaves.”
Tinker found the news vaguely disturbing. “That doesn’t help.”
“It’s like flying blind in the clouds — you have to have faith in what instruments tell you. The dreams tell me that I needed you. Things are still iffy — but I have a chance now to make everything right.”
Tinker was torn between relief and annoyance that Esme seemed to think Tinker’s part was done. She didn’t want to be responsible for all the astronauts, but she didn’t want to be stuck in space either. She didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t even stay decent. Without gravity to constrain it, the skirt of Tinker’s red silk dress developed a life of its own, determined to show off her panties as often as possible. Still, she had hoped they had gotten past all the dream bullshit. She hated not having an obvious direction to go, a clear-cut problem to solve. The path here had been so convoluted, the clues so obscure, that she would have never guessed where it was taking her. She supposed that she could only do everything she could imagine, and hope that one of them was the right thing.
Sighing, Tinker nudged one of the magic sinks. “These are just makeshift. They’ll fill quickly and then leak. We’ll have to burn off the magic until we can create a large, permanent storage tank.”
“How do we do burn it?” Esme asked.
“You burn it off by doing spells,” Tinker explained. “It can be used to create heat, light, cool things off, do healing—”
“Healing?” Jin seized hold of the word, proving that her ‘private’ conversation with Esme had been just an illusion.
Tinker pulled out her datapad and made sure it worked. “Well, I have spells for healing but I don’t know much about—”
Jin didn’t let Tinker finish. He scooped her up and they flew through the ship as if Jin had wings. “We’ve got so many wounded that we’ve wiped out the Dahe’s supplies. Most of the medical supplies on the other ships were destroyed.”
“I really don’t know much about healing,” Tinker finally managed to finish her statement.
“We’re desperate. Some of our people — we can’t do any more for them.”
“Are they tengu?” Tinker asked.
He stopped and looked down at her. “You won’t help us?”
“I didn’t say that — although a ‘please’ would go a long way. It makes a difference what spells I use. Some won’t work on humans — but they might work on tengu.”
“Please, help my people. I beg you. They’re dying.”
She felt shame and anger at the same time that he would think she would let a wounded person die merely because of some biological difference she could barely see. “I’ll do what I can. I just don’t know how much that will be.”
The infirmary was a tiny cramped place stained with blood, filled with people hooked to machines. The beds were more like cocoons with nylon bags holding the patients flat. Jin paused at the first bed to gaze at a blonde man laying there.
“What happened to Chan Way Kay?”
“Sorry, Jin, we lost her.” A man said from back of the room.
“This is Wai Sze Wong,” Jin turned Tinker’s attention to the patient to her other side. “She’s tengu.”
Wai Sze was Black from Tinker’s dream. More a sparrow than a crow, she was a little female with delicate wrists and fingers. Massive bruising on Wai Sze ran the range from deep purple to pale yellow. Apparently they had run out of surgical tape, as black electrical tape held splints on Wai Sze’s left arm and leg in place. The monitors on her showed an unsteady heartbeat.
Tinker gasped in the shock of recognition and the extent of Wai Sze’s injuries. “I–I — can only guess at how to help her.”
“So guess.” Jin gave her a look that spoke of trust and confidence. “We have done all we can, and she’s only getting worse. If you can’t save her, then we’re going to lose her.”
Tinker sighed and tried to think. Riki had recuperated quickly from the savage beating Tinker had given him, so the tengu probably had recuperative powers similar to the elves. Tinker had saved Windwolf’s life with a spell that focused magic into his natural healing powers. The ambient level of the ship, while enough to wreck havoc on the unshielded computer systems, was actually quite low. If the tengu’s ability was close enough to the elves, the same spell might save Wai Sze. She searched the memory of her datapad and found that she did have the spell downloaded.
“Do you have transferable circuit paper?” Tinker asked.
Jin nodded.
“Okay,” Tinker said. “I need the first magic sink we set up, some power leads, and a computer connection so I can print on the circuit paper.”
One of these days she had to learn bio magic. She hated gambling with people’s lives. Hopefully today wasn’t going to be the day that she guessed wrong.
She explained to the doctor how she needed Wai Sze prepped while Jin set people off to fetch the sinks and leads, and then Jin took her to print off the spell.
“If this spell works, we can use it on all the tengu.” She explained to Jin how it focused magic on the tengu’s natural abilities. “But it’s useless on humans. For them, I’ll need to see if there is a spell for their specific injury in my codex. It will be a much slower process.”
“Let’s save the spell onto this system, that way, if Wai Sze shows improvement, I can come back and print off more spells while you start working with the humans.”
When they returned, they found Wai Sze stripped bare to her waist. Burning with embarrassment, Tinker peeled the protective sheet from the circuit paper and pressed the spell to Wai Sze’s small chest as Jin watched her intently. It required a lot of fiddling to make sure it was smoothed down over the hills and valleys of Wai Sze’s breasts. On the female’s hip was a tattoo of a lion overlaying the Leo star constellation, Leo’s heart — the star Regulus — a blaze of blue-white in its chest. Tinker used it to change the subject. “She’s a Leo?”
“Hmm? Oh, that, no, it’s for Gracie’s husband, Leo. He got a tattoo for her in the same place, a little bird.”