Elfhome

Esme came stomping up the hallway, ignoring the elves now that they had stood down. It was still weird looking at Esme and knowing that she was her mother. Due to a fluke in the hyper-phase gate design, Esme had spent all of Tinker’s life stuck in one moment in time and hadn’t aged. She was still only a few years older than Tinker. Like Lain, Esme was a head taller than Tinker could ever hope to get, boyish thin, and judging by the color of her eyelashes, a pale blonde under the purple hair dye. Despite a week of hospital rest, Esme looked haggard. She still wore her torn, bloody and soot-smudged jumpsuit.

“I keep running into you at the strangest places,” Esme said. “What are you doing here, Scarecrow?”

If Tinker ever heard a stupid question, that was it. Breaking into the morgue was so blatant, it had to be obvious. “I’ve got official business here. What are you doing here?”

“Last I checked,” Esme said. “I’m here because of a snarky elf princess who landed me in Pittsburgh.”

Tinker shook her finger at Esme in frustration. “I saved your ass.”

“Yes, you did.” Esme scrubbed at her face as if she was exhausted. “I’m sorry; it’s all just hitting me hard. Everything I’ve been working for is over, and done, and I’m here, and I’m not going to be stuck out in space, trying to piece together a life on whatever was left of a colony on the other side of the galaxy that’s been hit by a major disaster. I’m stuck on Elfhome — in a city that’s been hit by a major disaster — so there’s sixty thousand humans instead of a few hundred — and there’s oni and tengu and a talking dragon. And last week was eighteen years ago.”

Tinker winced. It hadn’t occurred to her that Esme was facing such a wrenching mental readjustment. The tengu had been taking it all in stride, but they knew about the tengu, oni and talking dragon going in. When all was said and done, Esme had risked her life to save countless others.

“I don’t want to talk about what I’m doing here,” Tinker admitted reluctantly. “Because it could get me killed.”

“Oh,” Esme’s eyebrows knitted into worry. “Maybe you should just leave. I had a bad dream.”

“You dreamed about domi?” Pony asked, making Tinker realized that they’d been speaking Elvish with a smattering of English.

Esme shook her head. “No. I–I’ve been looking for someone. I had a dream about the place where he used to live. I dreamed of him running through the big empty rooms, laughing in hazy sunlight and when I woke up in the hospital, it suddenly hit me that I could see him. I never thought I’d actually get to see him and I just about lost it when I realized I would.”

“Him?” Tinker feeling slightly betrayed. Esme realized that eighteen years had past and went looking for an old lover? Did she even remember she had left a kid behind?

Esme gave a laugh that edged along mania. “When I checked out of the hospital, I had some vague plan of calling my sister, but I just kept walking and walking. I hiked the whole way to the island. The place is in ruins — no one has lived there for years. The place looks like it was ransacked. There were pencil marks and dates on the wall — a record of him getting taller and taller — and then five years ago, it just stops!”

Tinker’s grandfather must have only told Esme that he was calling his grandchild Alexander Graham Bell. Esme was looking for a son. From the sounds of it, Esme had gone to the abandoned hotel on Neville Island where Tinker had grown up. After their grandfather died, Oilcan had talked her into moving to McKees Rocks. He moved their grandfather’s books and files to safe storage, leaving behind all their childhood clutter, and boarded shut the hotel.

“There were all the little bits of him scattered around,” Esme said wistfully. “Little toy robots and model airplanes and one hallway that had tiny little handprints all up and down it in blue paint — okay, that was kind of Blair Witch creepy — but it was his hands. And he had the constellations done in glow-in-the-dark paint on his ceiling — just like I had when I was a kid.”

Lain had helped Tinker paint the stars, muttering darkly, “Nature or nurture?”

“He was everywhere and nowhere,” Esme whispered. “And that’s when I really did lose it.”

All of which Tinker could have prevented if she had just told Esme the truth when they were on the Dahe Hao together. “I’m sorry.”

“I cried myself to sleep on his bed.” Esme walked to one of the morgue drawers and pressed her hand to the stainless steel door. “And then I dreamed where I’d find him.”

“What? Oh, no, no, no.” Tinker moved to stop her but Esme opened the door and pulled out the drawer. “You don’t need to…”

There was something horribly wrong about the shrouded body inside. The hidden geography was all too short and lacking in landmarks: the peak made by the nose, the valley of the throat, the distant points of the feet. Esme unzipped the bag in one rushed motion, like she was getting it done fast before she chickened out.