"Wen Spencer - Tinker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spencer Wen)

 1: Life Debt




The wargs chased the elf over Pittsburgh Scrap and Salvage's tall chain-link fence shortly
after the hyperphase gate powered down.
Tinker had been high up in the crane tower, shuffling cars around the dark sprawling maze of
her scrap yard, trying to make room for the influx of wrecks Shutdown Day always brought in.
Her cousin, Oilcan, was out with the flatbed wrecker, clearing their third call of the night, and it
wasn't Shutdown proper yet.
Normally, clearing space was an interesting puzzle game, played on a gigantic scale. Move
this stripped car to the crusher. Consolidate two piles of engine blocks. Lightly place a new
acquisition onto the tower of to-be-stripped vehicles. She had waited until too late, though,
tinkering in her workshop with her newest invention. Shuffling the scrap around at night was
proving nearly impossible. Starting with the crane's usual clumsy handlingтАФits ancient fishing
pole design and manual controls often translated the lightest tap into a several-foot movement of
the large electromagnet strung off the boomтАФshe also had to factor in the distorted shadows
thrown by the crane's twin floodlights, the deep pools of darkness, and the urge to rush, since
Shutdown was quickly approaching.
Worse yet, the powerful electromagnet was accumulating a dangerous level of magic. A
strong ley line ran through the scrap yard, so using the crane always attracted some amount of
magic. She had invented a siphon to drain off the power to a storage unit also of her own design.
The prolonged periods of running the crane were overwhelming the siphon's capacity. Even with
taking short breaks with the magnet turned off, the accumulated magic writhed a deep purple
about the disc and boom.
At ten minutes to midnight, she gave up and shut down the electromagnet. The electric
company changed over from the local Pittsburgh power grid to the national grid to protect
Pittsburgh's limited resources from the spike in usage that Shutdown brought. She had no reason
to risk dropping a car sixty feet onto something valuable because some yutz flipped a switch
early.
So she sat and waited for Shutdown, idly kicking her steel-tipped boots against the side of the
crane's control booth. Her scrap yard sat on a hill overlooking the Ohio River. From the crane,
she could see the barges choking the waterway, the West End Bridge snarled with traffic, and ten
or more miles of rolling hills in all directions. She also had an unobstructed view of the full
Elfhome moon, rising up through the veil effect on the Eastern horizon. The distortion came from
the hyperphase lightly holding its kidnapping victim, a fifty-mile-diameter chunk of Earth
complete with parts of downtown Pittsburgh, prisoner in the foreign dimension of Elfhome. The
veil shimmered like heat waves over the pale moon face, nearly identical to that of Earth's own
moon. Ribbons of red and blue danced in the sky along the Rim's curve, the collision of realities
mimicking the borealis effect. Where the Rim cut through the heart of Pittsburgh, just a few miles
southeast, the colors gleamed brilliantly. They paled as the Rim arced off, defining the displaced
land mass. Beyond the Rim, the dark forest of Elfhome joined the night sky, black meeting black,
the blaze of stars the only indication where the first ended and the second began.
So much beauty! Part of her hated going back to Earth, even for a day. Pittsburgh, however,
needed the influx of goods that Shutdown Day brought; the North American counterpart of
Elfhome was lightly populated and couldn't support a city of sixty thousand humans.
Off in the west, somewhere near the idle airport, a firework streaked skyward and boomed
into bright flowers of colorтАФthe advent of Shutdown providing the grounded airplane crews with
an excuse to party. Another firework followed.