“Are you sure?” Aunt Kitty asked a dozen times. “It’s awfully grown up.”
“It’s perfect.” Jillian turned in a circle to show it off to full effect.
Aunt Kitty took a video and sent it to their mother. “We’ll see what she thinks.”
A minute later a firm “No black, it’s not a funeral” came back.
Two stores later, just shy of closing hours, they found two matching tea-length dresses of soft shimmering yellow with wide black belts. The dresses had poof skirts thanks to layers of crinoline but were fully lined, so the itchy material didn’t touch bare skin. With their mother’s texted approval, the dresses were bought and they headed home, exhausted.
They spent the last hour getting ready for bed with phones in hand, dialing, disconnecting at the first tone of the busy signal, redialing. The minutes ticked down and then Shutdown was over.
They stared numbly at the clock as it turned to midnight.
“What we do?” Jillian asked.
Louise called April, who answered on the first ring.
“Hello?”
“Ugh!” Louise flopped back in bed. If April answered, she wasn’t on Elfhome.
“Hello?” April said again.
“It’s us,” Louise said.
“Oh.” It wasn’t a good sounding “oh” but a “but I’ve got bad news” kind of “oh.”
“What happened? Is it Alexander? Did something happen to her?”
“No, no, it’s that I didn’t get across the border.” April sounded tired, but not stressed, yet somehow Louise was sure that she had horrible news. “I’d gone to Cranberry to try and get across. Normally it’s the best bet. There was an shoot-out on Veteran’s Bridge, though, and things got all screwed up.”
“A shoot-out?” The post-doc had mentioned a twenty-car accident but nothing about a shoot-out.
“I’m not sure what happened—the details are really sketchy—but apparently there was a big pileup on Veteran’s Bridge. There was a heavily-armed group of smugglers in one of the cars and they tried to kill the cops that showed up to direct traffic. They shot at least one person and they rigged a bomb to take out the bridge. The EIA bomb squad managed to defuse it. Then the rescue teams used Earth-based life-flight helicopters to fly out the wounded.”
All of which would have stopped traffic incoming from Cranberry completely.
“I did get through to my parents and cousins,” April continued. “At first they didn’t know whom I was talking about. I think my mom is going senile early; Old Man Bell saved my life, and she didn’t remember him at all. She was no help. I had more luck with my cousin, Ellen. It took ten minutes of describing the hotel on Neville Island, old man Bell, and his two grandchildren who build go-carts, for her to figure out who I meant. Apparently Alexander doesn’t use her real name.”
“What name does she use?” Dufae would be just as dangerous.
“Tinker.”
“Tinker?” Louise echoed, mystified.
“As in Tinker Bell?” Jillian cried. “Eewww.”
“She doesn’t seem to use a last name. I think she just goes by Tinker. And Orville is Oilcan. My cousin saw the two of them last week. They’re racing hoverbikes professionally.”
“Hoverbikes?”
“Alex invented them!” April sounded surprised and proud. “They use magic to hover, but they also have a gasoline engine. I’m not sure I understood that part completely. Racing them is a big sport event that everyone follows. Ellen says that she only knows it’s the same two kids because my folks lived down the street from them for years. She thinks that Sparrow’s people are going to have a hard time finding her if all they know is her real name.”
“How much did you tell your cousin?” Louise cried.
“Not everything.” April sighed. “Nothing about you two. But it was getting obvious that I wasn’t going to get through and I didn’t want Ellen drawing attention to herself or Alexander by talking to the wrong person. I warned her that it’s not safe to talk to the EIA or the police or anyone else outside the family. I told her that this is a widespread conspiracy, and it being elves, their moles could have been put into place shortly after the first Startup. The first time I talked to her, she thought I was an utter loon.”
“And the second time?” Because it sounded like there was a second phone call that went totally differently than the first.
“She heard on the news that one of the sekasha had been killed, and Windwolf was missing.”
“Oh no! Which one?” Oh, please god, not Pony!