“I’m sure you do.” His voice was heavy with sadness. “It’s just that when I saw your last video, I thought that you must know more than the news we got from Elfhome prior to Startup. I thought you knew that the viceroy survived the attack on him.”
“You can’t tell anyone that we don’t know!” the twins cried.
“We do know who attacked him,” Louise said.
“At least some of the people involved,” Jillian said.
“They’re doing a lot of horrible things like kidnapping children and killing scientists,” Louise continued. “And they want the quarantine zone expanded. They attacked Windwolf, and now they’re using his disappearance to push through the vote.”
Nigel made a surprised, pained sound like someone had punched him in the stomach. “So humans murdered the viceroy?”
“He’s not dead!” Louise felt sure of it, although she knew that she couldn’t prove it. “Everyone has to stop acting like he is.”
“And we’re not sure what they are,” Jillian added. “They might look human, but we don’t think they really are.”
“They might be elves,” Louise said.
“Evil anti-elves,” Jillian cried.
Louise winced. The extremely short version sounded stupid. She wasn’t sure, however, how to condense three years of secretive information gathering. “The Museum of Natural History has an exhibit of things created by elves found on Earth over the last two thousand years. The elves were getting here via natural ‘hyperphase gates’ found in cave systems; basically magic-created fissures between the two universes. These pathways were their equivalent to the Silk Road. Elves used to come to Earth to sell these items. Around two hundred and forty years ago, they had a war with someone. Someone so powerful that they destroyed all the pathways between the worlds to end the war.”
Nigel tilted his head in confusion. “I visited the exhibit yesterday. I noticed that they didn’t explain how the items ended up on Earth. How do you know all this?”
“Some of it is deductive reasoning,” Louise admitted. “Windwolf already knew English when Director Maynard met him during the first Startup. He had copies of maps that King Charles the Second issued to the Hudson Bay Company when he founded their first expedition in 1668. His copy also showed an English trading post where Pittsburgh stands. It dates the map between 1740, when William Trent established that outpost, and 1758, when Fort Duquesne was built by the French.”
“I never heard that about the map before,” Nigel said.
Jillian waved it off as unimportant. “One of the EIA archive videos from Maynard’s first contact with Windwolf has a close-up of the map. The EIA has restricted access to their videos, so no one has actually studied them at length.”
“I see.” Nigel clearly was afraid to ask how they’d gotten hold of it.
It seemed safe to lump the codex in with data they’d seen but didn’t own. “We’ve also found the journal of an elf who was in France during the 1700s. We’re not sure when he arrived, but he was there for several years prior to being killed in the French Revolution in the 1790s. When he attempted to travel back to Elfhome, the way was unexpectedly blocked. He traveled to several points and was dismayed to find all the pathways closed off.”
“Where did you find that?” Nigel asked.
“We can’t say,” Louise said. “There are a lot of things we’ve done that weren’t technically legal.”
“So let’s just not go there — okay?” Jillian gave Louise an annoyed look for bringing up the codex in the first place. “The thing is, there’s no way to know how many elves were trapped on Earth or what side of the war that they were on. But the ones we saw didn’t look like elves. We’re only guessing that they were because they talked about being alive for hundreds of years.”
“The important thing is that they have moles in the EIA and the United Nations and possibly among the police force in Pittsburgh.”
“You have proof of this?” Nigel asked.
“Nothing we can show you,” Louise said. “But this isn’t a guess. We know this for sure.”
Jillian nodded. “It’s why you haven’t been able to go to Elfhome. They’re using the EIA to block visas of anyone that they don’t want in Pittsburgh. But NBC bypassed their normal channels and pushed your paperwork through.”
“We don’t know why they’ve been trying to keep you out, but they don’t want you there. They might try and kill you.”
“But you need to go,” Jillian said. “The people in Pittsburgh have no idea that they’re about to be in the middle of war.”
“A war between. .?”
“The elves and the anti-elves. The anti-elves have been building up an army — someplace — and they’ve been kidnapping scientists to make a gate like the one in orbit, only on land.” Jillian took his tablet and linked it with theirs. “Here’s a list of scientists they’ve kidnapped. We know that everyone on this list is dead, except for Kensbock. We’re not sure they’re the ones that took him; he wasn’t doing the same type of work. We also know that the NSA is looking into the kidnappings, but we don’t think they’ve realized who is behind them.”
