Wood Sprites

Jillian covered her mouth to hide the betraying tremble of lips and stood back up. The hurt lost look was filling her eyes as her control crumbled more. “Where — where’s my ball?”

Crow Boy staggered back to the window like someone had hit him with a sledgehammer. Super ninja or not, he was still just a fourteen-year-old boy, stranded on a world full of enemies. “What are we going to do?”

“We fall back to Plan B,” Louise stated as calmly as she could.

“We have a Plan B?” Crow Boy asked.

“We don’t, but the elves will have one. They probably knew that the gate could be damaged in an accident at any time — or the Chinese might be forced to actually abandon the colony program — or Queen Soulful Ember might figure out what they were doing and somehow blast the gate out of orbit. Feng was told years ago what to do in case of emergency. They have plans. Long-thought-out plans.”

“Okay.” Jillian breathed like she was willing to grab hold of any lifeline thrown to her.

“Yves is finding out right now that Shutdown isn’t going to happen.” Louise ignored the fact that Jillian whimpered and Crow Boy gasped as if she’d hit him. “He’ll switch to Plan B, and that involves getting to Elfhome another way.”

“No, no, no!” Jillian cried, her voice breaking. She covered her face with her hands, hiding her weakness as logic tore away hope. “If they had another way, they wouldn’t be trying to kidnap Alexander.”

“They want Alexander because there isn’t another way to Onihida,” Louise lied quickly to cut that fear off but then realized that she was right. “The tengu were isolated because the pathways from Onihida to Earth had been blocked.”

“By the dragons,” Crow Boy explained, “to try and isolate Onihida, but it didn’t work. They missed one path, but after the war, the elves pulled down all the pathways, even the ones between Earth and Elfhome.”

“See! See! Ming’s army is on Onihida! The island we blew up was the only way for his army to get to Earth. He would still need to get his soldiers from the China Sea to Monroeville first.”

“You blew up Pejamu Island?” Crow Boy cried in surprise.

“Parts of it.” Louise waved him away from distracting her argument. “The elves only blocked the pathways that they knew—”

“The caves!” Jillian cried.

“Yes,” Crow Boy said. “The pathway was in a cave.”

“No!” Jillian waved her arms frantically. “Remember all the maps of caves that Esme had? I bet Plan B is to go to Elfhome via caves.”

They’d ruled that out. Louise didn’t want to crush Jillian, though, not when she was so fragile.

“It would be difficult,” Crow Boy stated. “But they could do it.”

The twins turned to look at him with surprise. “What?”

“They found several cave systems in Westernlands that lead to Elfhome, only all the pathways were much too small to be useful. They took the worst and tried to expand the passages. It turns out that any construction destroys the pathway; the connection between the worlds is cut completely.” They stared at him in silence until he added, “The ones they attempted to expand had been too small for even a child to use. The ones that remain, you can squeeze a person through.”

“Child” made Louise think of the tengu children. Yves had been calmly sorting through the mansion’s treasures, keeping what would be useful for the takeover of Elfhome. He’d keep the children alive if he could still get them to Elfhome.

“Where are these pathways?” Jillian asked.

Crow Boy deflated, shaking his head. “I don’t know. We only know of their failures. They otherwise kept the natural pathways secret from us.”

Louise could almost see the cracks in Jillian’s composure widening. “Yves would want to stay as close to Pittsburgh as possible. That’s where all their resources are centered.” Louise did a quick search. There were fewer than a dozen caves listed for Pennsylvania, most of them more than a hundred miles from the quarantine zone. Only one was close. “Laurel Caverns. Was that one of the caves that Esme had a map to?”

“Yes, it was.” Nikola tilted his head, searching out data. “Desmarais bought it from Randolph Humbert in 1861, when it was known as Dulaney’s Cave, and he changed the name. Desmarais opened it as a show cave in 1961.”

“If they didn’t sell the cave after exploring it carefully, then there’s a pathway,” Crow Boy said. “It most likely is only big enough for a person to crawl through. They could send scouts through and some camping gear, but nothing larger.”

Between predators like wyverns and wargs, man-eating plants and rivers full of sharks, Elfhome’s wilderness wasn’t someplace you could live with just a tent and sleeping bag. “They wanted to take over the Eastern Hemisphere of Elfhome. A pup tent in the middle of the Western Hemisphere would seem to be wasted effort. At least, until the first Startup. Afterwards, though, they could have used it as a secret back door to Pittsburgh. They could have a fortress built over the cave on the other side.”