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The dust, however, was making her nose itch.

"Can you take these boxes out to the parking pad?" She waved toward the square of sunbaked 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?"

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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 that 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 because 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 had made.

"Wow." That too she pulled out and had put in the Rolls to take home with her. The next box 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.

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"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."

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She grunted and sat up, not wanting to fall back to sleep, perchance 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."

"You're telling me." In her dreams, she hadn't been able to save him from being flayed of his tattoos. She leaned against his bare arm, his skin and tattoos wonderfully intact, glad for the opportunity to reassure herself without making a big deal of it.
Just a nightmare.

He smelled wonderful. After weeks together, she knew his natural scent. He was wearing some kind of cologne, an enticing light musk. She felt the now familiar desire uncoil inside her. Gods, why did stress make her want to lick honey off his rock-hard abs? Was this some kind of weird primitive wiring—most of us are going off to be eaten by saber-toothed tigers, so let's fuck like crazy before the gene pool lessens? Or was she uniquely screwed up?

Every night with Pony among the oni had been a torture of temptation. There had been only one bed and she had been stupid enough to insist that they share it. She would lay awake, desperately wanting to reach out to him—to be held, to be made love to, to be taken care of. She managed to resist because of a little voice that reminded her that she would swap Pony for Windwolf in a heartbeat—that it was her husband she really wanted. There had been no way to kick Pony out of the bed without admitting how much she wanted him, so he and her secret temptation stayed.

Even now she fought the urge to plant little kisses on his bicep.
I'm a married woman. I'm married and
I do love Windwolf.
She couldn't even imagine being married to Pony, although she wasn't sure why—he was to-die-for cute. Unfortunately, she could imagine having hot sex with him. She sighed as her curiosity stirred to wonder what running her tongue up the curve of his arm would taste like.
Now
I've done it—it will eat me alive wondering . . .

"
Domi
, what is it?"

Embarrassment burned through her. "N-n-nothing. I'm just tired. I haven't been sleeping well."

"Have you found what you needed?" he asked.

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"No." She shook her head and yawned again. She saved her notes on the datapad and handed Esme's file to him. "Put this in the Rolls. I'll get back to work."

Luckily the information she was looking for was in the F's, under "Flux Compression Generator".
Huh?

Normally compressing a magnetic field would generate more amperes of current than a lightning bolt and cause an electromagnetic pulse. What in hell was her grandfather thinking? But there was no mistaking the Reinhold floor layout, and the accompanying notes on the spell. With the folder, it should be fairly simple to recreate her grandfather's spell.

She heard the scrape of boots on the cement behind her. The
sekasha
were probably bored to tears.

"This is what I was looking for." She got to her feet and brushed the dust from her skirt. She looked up and was startled to find the
sekasha
forming a wall of muscle between her and Nathan Czernowski. The sight of him put a tingle of nervousness through her. "Nathan? What are you doing here?"

"I saw the Rolls and figured that it had to be you."

"Yeah, it's me." She busied herself with the boxes as an excuse not to look at him, wondering why she felt so weird until she remembered where they'd left off. Last time she'd seen him, he—he—she didn't even want to assign a word to it.

Nathan had been like an older brother to her and Oilcan. He'd hung around the garage and scrap yard on his off hours, drinking beer with them, and shooting the breeze. On racing days, he acted as security for her pit. She knew all his sprawling family members, had attended their weddings and funerals and birthday parties. There wasn't another man in Pittsburgh that she would have let into her loft while she was dressed only in a towel. Nobody else she would have thought herself utterly safe with.

Then he'd held her down, torn off her towel, and tried to push into her.

In one terrifying second, he'd become a large, frightening stranger. She had never considered before how tall he was, how strong he was, or how easily he could do anything he wanted with her.

He hadn't actually done—it. He'd stopped. He seemed to be listening to her. She would never know if he actually would have gotten off her, and let her up, and gone back to the Nathan she knew, because Pony had come to her rescue.

A day later she'd been snatched up by the queen's Wyverns, dragged away to attend the royal court, and then kidnapped by the oni, where she witnessed true evil. She hadn't thought of Nathan once in all that time. She wasn't sure what she felt now.

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"I heard about the monster—" Nathan started.

"You and all of Pittsburgh. I'm fine!"

"I see." Nathan gazed her wistfully. "You look beautiful."

"Thanks." She knew it was mostly the jewel red silk dress. She also knew that it clung to her like paint where it wasn't exposing vast amounts of skin. Suddenly she felt weirdly under-dressed.

They stood a moment in nervous silence. Finally, Nathan wet his lips and said, "I'm sorry. I went way over the line, and I'm—so—sorry."

She burned with sudden embarrassment; it was like being naked under him again. "I don't want to talk about it."

"No, I'm ashamed of what I did, and I want to apologize— though I know that really doesn't cut it." His voice grew husky with self-loathing. "I would have killed another man for doing it. That I was drunk and jealous excuses nothing."

"Nathan, I don't know how to deal with this."

"I just loved you so much. I still do. It kills me that I lost you. I just don't want you to hate me."

"I don't hate you," she whispered. "I'm pissed to hell at you. And I'm a little scared of you now. But I don't hate you."

At least she didn't think she did. He had stopped—that counted for something, didn't it? More than anything, she felt stupid for letting it happen. Everyone had told her that things wouldn't work out between her and Nathan—and she had ignored them.

They stood in awkward silence. It dawned on her that the
sekasha
were still between her and Nathan, a quiet angry presence. She realized that Pony must have told Stormsong who Nathan was and what he'd done, and embarrassment burned through her. Once again she was having her nose ground into the fact that she was being constantly watched. She pushed past the
sekasha
and Nathan, wondering how much detail had Pony told Stormsong. She could trust Pony with her life, but not her privacy; she wasn't even sure he understood the concept.

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