Wolf Who Rules

And under it all was the dark suspicion that she didn't really have the power to protect anything, despite what Tooloo might think. True Flame thought she was a useless child. The Stone Clan was trying to kill her. Windwolf had lent her his power, but if she took a stand against him, would he take it back?

***

When Wolf asked Tinker to be his domi, he suspected that she would be able to lead. Certainly, when she spoke, people obeyed. She didn't seem to be aware that she had the quality, but the day she saved his life, everyone listened to her without quarreling. Time and time again since then there had been satisfying - although usually mystifying - proof that he was right about her. He found his domi deep in another mysterious project in the middle of the Westinghouse Bridge, overlooking the Ghostlands.

"What is this?" Wolf pointed to a large cylindrical machine beside his domi.

"This is an Imperial Searchlight." Tinker patted the three-foot tall light fixture. "It uses a Xenon 4000 watt bulb to output 155,000 lumens. They say that the output is visible at distances of more than twenty kilometers."

Wolf eyed the wires snaking away to either end of the bridge. "Do you have more than one?"

"Three. I tried to get four, but these babies are hard to find in Pittsburgh - and a bitch to move. They weigh nearly two hundred pounds and then you need almost four hundred pounds of ballast so they don't tip over. I put the other two on either hill to get maximum spread."

Tinker settled at the table at the center of the bridge. "I've got them tied together to this control board. I'm trying to track down a manual on-" she paused to eye her screen closely. "Ah, there, Morse code."

Wolf crouched beside her. "You're going to use the light to communicate?"

She smiled and leaned down to touch her forehead to his. "Exactly. By the composition of the buildings inside the Ghostlands, it's clear that Earth is one of the dimensions intersected by this discontinuity. The blue shift of the area seems to indicate that certain spectrums of light are being absorbed and only the blue is reflecting back to us."

"So other spectrums are traveling on through to the other dimensions?"

"I think so. If we communicate with Earth, we might be able to get them to help. I'm just a little worried that no one on their end will be paying attention - this will only work in the middle of night."

"They're missing a city with sixty thousands souls. They're paying attention."

"Well - there is that." She kissed him and went back to work.

"Have you considered that the oni will see this too?"

"Yes, I know, that's a flaw in the plan. We'll have to consider any communication from another world as suspect."

He considered this problem as she typed. "It is unfortunate that the EIA had been compromised. Maynard might have had a way to verify any communication from the U.N. is authentic."

"Hmmm, hadn't considered that angle. Human agencies that have security protocols. Wait-I wonder - what happened to those NSA agents?"

"The human agents that tried to kidnap you?"

His tone made her glance at him and giggle. "Oh don't look like that. They only wanted to protect me from the oni. They actually were nice, once they stopped trying to drag me back to Earth."

"Maynard will know where they are, if they are in Pittsburgh."

She took out a cell phone and made it beep repeatedly. "I would have never dreamed having the God of Pittsburgh's phone number in my address book."

"He is not God of Pittsburgh. He is our servant."

"Somehow I doubt that he sees it that way." Her face changed as the call went through. "Oh, hi, yeah, this is Tinker. Say, do you know what happened to the NSA agents? Briggs and Durrack? Really?" She listened for a moment. "Oh cool! Can you send them out to Turtle Creek? I need them out here. Thanks."

As she hung up, Wolf wondered what Maynard made of the phone call. It was a perfect example, though, of his domi's leadership skills. She saw the need and did what was needed to fill it without guidance from him. All she needed was the authority of her title. And she probably did not realize how rare the ability was.

"They didn't leave last Shutdown, so they're stuck here." She relayed what she learned. "They've been working with him. Apparently when they kidnapped me, he put them through a detailed background check. They're one of the few people in Pittsburgh he could trust to be who they said they were. He was using them to weed through the EIA's databases to find altered files and recover the original data."

Her walkie-talkie beeped and one of the work crews reported in that the other two searchlights were in place and pointed down into the valley. The walkie-talkies tickled him to no end. That was what he wanted for his people - the ease of communication that humans had.

Tinker glanced up into the night sky. Full dark lay full on the land and the stars gleamed brilliant overhead. "What do you think? Is it dark enough?"

"It will not get any darker without clouds."