Wen Spencer - Wolf Who Rules

"Do you know if it's a natural creature or a bio-engineered one?" Lain took out her datapad and opened a new file to take notes.

"No. The oni didn't mention anything to me about the dragon, and the sekasha don't know. What's the difference?"

"The result of creatures of evolving in an environment full of magic is often they can use magic to their own benefit. Take the black willow; it's mutated from tree with all the standard limitations to a highly effective predator. By in large, though, the bio-engineered creatures tend to be more dangerous than the randomly mutated creatures."

"Like the wargs?" Tinker knew that the wolf-like creatures had been created for war but now ranged wild in the forest surrounding Pittsburgh.

"Yes. The wargs not only have the frost breath, but they show no signs of aging or disease and their wounds heal at a speed that suggests a spell somehow encoded at cellular level. They're massive, intelligent, and aggressive in nature."

"So the question is 'how much did the oni dragon get in their DNA gift baskets?'"

"Yes. But let's start with the basics. We've never encountered an Elfhome dragon - we only know that they exist because the elves keep telling us that they do - and that we really don't want to study them closely."

Tinker laughed at that comment.

"Is this dragon mammal or reptile?" Lain asked.

"I'm not sure. It had scales, but it also had some sort weird mane. It was long, and lean, with big square jaw." Tinker put her hands up to approximate the size of the head. "Short legs with big claws that it could pick things up with."

Lain made a slight amused sound and got up to put the teakettle back on the stove. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!"

It took Tinker a moment to identify the quote, a poem out of Alice through the Looking Glass.

"We fell down the hole and through the looking glass."

The sudden connection with her dream was like a slap. White's face jolted into her mind again. With the addition of the book title, though, she remembered where she seen White before.

"You know, I had the oddest dream about Boo-boo Knees."

Lain whipped around to face her. "Boo?"

"At least, I think it was Boo-boo."

"H-h-how do you know about Boo's nickname?"

"The picture. It has her name on the back of it."

"Which picture?"

"The one in the book." When Lain continued to stare at her in confusion, Tinker went to scan the bookcases until she found the book in question: The Annotated Alice. Complete in one book was both Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass and What She Found There with copious footnotes that explained layer upon layers of meaning in what seemed to be just a odd little children's story. Tinker had discovered the book when she was eight. Lain apparently had forgotten the photo tucked into the book, but Tinker hadn't.

It was an old two-dimensional color photo, a young woman with short purple hair. She hovered in mid-air, the Earth a brilliant blue moon behind her. She challenged the camera with a level brown-eyed gaze and a set jaw, as if she was annoyed with its presence. On her right temple was a sterile adhesive bandage. Written on the back was "Even in zero gravity, I find things to bang myself on. Love. Boo-boo Knees."

At the point Tinker had found it, she'd never seen a two-dimensional photograph; neither her grandfather or Lain were ones for personal pictures. From its limited perspective to the name of Boo-boo Knees, she'd found it fascinating. She stared at it until - ten years later - she could have drawn it from memory.

The picture was where she carefully returned it, marking the place where one story ended and another started.

"Oh!" Lain took the photo. "I've forgotten about that."

"Who is she?" Why am I dreaming about her? Tinker flipped through the book, remembering now nearly forgotten passages echoing back from the dream. The tea party with the Mad Hatter murdering time, leaving his watch stuck at six o'clock. The checkerboard layout that they flown over. Alice and the Red Queen hand in hand, like the Tinker and White had been in the dream, racing to stay in place.

"That's Esme," Lain identified White as her younger sister.

"It is?" Tinker reclaimed the photo. She had always imagined Esme as a younger version of Lain, but Esme looked nothing like her. Come to think of it - Tinker had never seen a picture of Esme before, not even her official NASA mission photo.

"I'm not surprised you're dreaming of her," Lain was saying as Tinker continued to search the photo for the cause of her dreams. "You're bound to be upset about the gate and the colonists."

Was that the true reason? The dream seemed so real compared to the rest of her nightmares. She didn't know Boo-boo Knees was Lain's sister, and Lain had many retired astronauts as friends, so Tinker had no reason to assume that this was a picture of a colonist. And why all the Alice in Wonderland references? Were they just reminders of where the photo was stored - or that the colonist had dropped into a mirror reflection of Earth. Certainly there was nothing to say that Earth had only two reflections: Elfhome and Onihida.

"Lost, lost," The crows had cried.

According to Riki, the first colony ship, the Tianlong Hao was crewed entirely by tengu. If Black was a tengu female, that would explain the crows - but what about the hedgehogs? Tinker flipped through the book, found a picture of Alice with a flamingo and a hedgehog. The queen was screaming, "Off with his head!" Was this some oblique reference to the queen of the elves?

"Oh, this is going to give me a headache," Tinker murmured.

Down the hall, the phone rang. Lain gave her an odd, worried look and went to answer it.

Tinker found herself alone with the photograph of Lain's younger sister, looking defiantly out at her. "Why am I dreaming of you? I don't know where you are. I don't know how to save you. Hell, I don't even know how to save Pittsburgh."

Lain limped back into the kitchen. "That was Reinholds. The freezer in question is shut down because the compressor needs repaired. They said if I have someone to repair the unit, we could store the tree there. They'll even throw in some free ice cream."

"He eats the fruit of the tree that walks," Tinker suddenly remembered all of what White - Esme - had said. "Follow the tree to the house of ice and sip sweetly of the cream."

"I'll go look at the compressor." Tinker kept hold of the book. She had a bad feeling she was going to reread the silly thing. "And see if I can fix it. I think I have to do this. Can you do me a favor in the meantime? See if you can find out anything about this oni dragon." Tinker described the magical shield that the dragon generated. "If we have to fight it again, I want to be able to hurt it."

For years, Tinker had thought of herself as famous. The invention and mass production of the hoverbike made Tinker's name well-known even before she started to race. True, few people realized that the girl in the 'Team Tinker' shirt was the famed inventor/racer; still, she often got a reaction when she introduced herself.

But she wasn't prepared for the welcome she received at the Reinholds offices.

The receptionist looked up as Tinker and her bodyguards entered. "Can I help…" the woman started, and then her gaze shifted from Pony to Tinker, and her question ended in a high squeal that drew everyone's eyes. "Oh, my god! Oh, my god! It's the fairy princess!"

Tinker glanced over her shoulder, hoping that there would be a female in diaphanous white behind her. No such luck. "Pardon?"

"You're her!" The woman jumped up and down, hands to her mouth. "You're Tinker, the fairy princess!"

Other office people came forward. One woman had a slickie in hand, which she held out with a digital marker. "Can you autograph this for me, vicereine?"