“What—?” I asked.
Li Qin smiled. “I don’t know. Isn’t it fabulous? It’s a mystery. I was going through the contents of the storage locker, and when I reached this, I felt magic in the case. It’s worked into the whole structure of the server. I tried opening the panel on the back, to see whether there were runes etched inside, and I found wood.”
“Wood?”
“Wood. It’s as if someone tried to integrate a computer system with a living structure, something like what the Dryads use. It’s nothing I’ve ever seen before, and it’s fascinating. So of course I tried to turn it on.”
“Of course . . .” I said, somewhat baffled.
“But it wouldn’t come on!” She sounded both delighted and personally affronted, like the—the server? Why was she referring to a box as if it were a member of the household staff?—had refused to function just to spite her. “Do you understand how Shyi Shuai work?”
“You’re not Seers, I know that.”
“That’s correct. We don’t see the future, but we can nudge it when we want to. Sort of sharpen our luck and prod things along.”
I blinked. “So why does anything bad ever happen?”
“So many reasons that I couldn’t possibly list them all, but the big one where I’m concerned is that we’re not Seers. We can’t influence an outcome if we don’t know the outcome is going to need influencing. You understand?”
“No.”
“All right, let’s look at it another way: when I want something to go one way and not another, I can start poking luck to show me the best path to getting what I want. Sort of asking very narrow yes-or-no questions, and then using them to dowse the correct result. I want this server to come on. So I prodded luck and asked if that was possible. The answer was affirmative.”
“You talk to luck?”
She stopped to look at me flatly. “For a changeling living in an enchanted tower, you sure do want things to make sense according to a narrow set of rules. Luck doesn’t talk. It’s not a person with a language and an opinion. But it can answer you, if you ask correctly and know how to listen. That good enough?”
It wasn’t, but I didn’t think pushing would get me a better answer. I nodded.
“Great. Anyway, once I knew it was possible to turn the server on, I started trying to figure out what that would require. Was it a thing, a spell, a person . . . ? And no matter how I asked, I kept circling back to ‘person.’ There was someone who could help me get the server to come on. So I started trying to winnow down where they might be. Are they in Dreamer’s Glass? No. Are they in the Kingdom of the Mists? Yes. From there, I ran through the various fiefdoms until I hit Shadowed Hills, and this was a long, arduous, mind-numbing process, so I’m going to skip to the part where I figured out I needed a member of Duke Torquill’s immediate family. Not the Duke himself, and not his brother, either. Meaning it was either you or your sister.”
“You could have requested one of us specifically.”
“Um, not so much.” She spread her hands. “Your mother is epic protective of you two. Like, I know people who think you don’t exist, like your mom’s trying for the fae equivalent of tax fraud—and you don’t know what that means, so forget I said anything—but if I asked for either of you by name, I’d fail. The server would never come on, sad Duchess, no solving the mystery. I had to wait for a time when your uncle couldn’t respond to a request for a family member by coming himself, and when your mother wouldn’t be around to insert herself into the process.”
“Moving Day,” I said, the timing suddenly falling into place.
Li Qin nodded. “Duke Sylvester is a slacker who never does more than absolutely required by his position, but he does the bare minimum, reliably and always. If I asked during the leadup to Moving Day, and he didn’t have a good reason to refuse me, as his equal, he’d ask you or your sister. And if he did it while your mother was out of town, there was a decent chance I’d get the hidden daughter.”
She said that like it was some sort of victory. I blinked. “You wanted me in specific?”
“I told you I wanted to know more about you. And all the questions I asked indicated I had the best shot at success if you were the one pressing the button.” She stepped back, gesturing to the server. “So please, October. For me, press the button.”
“This is really strange, and I’m not completely comfortable with it.”
“Understandable.”
“What happens if I don’t press the button?”
“The server never comes on, and I am sad.”
“Never?”
“Not through any other route I’ve been able to find.”
“And if I do press the button . . . ?”
“It comes on, and I find out what the server is for.” Li Qin smiled. “I couldn’t figure out how to ask a question that would get me a straight answer on whether that’s a good thing, but I like satiating my curiosity, so I’m calling it a win either way.”
“You are very weird.”
“I know. Will you please press the button?”
Cautiously, I approached the server. I wanted to tell her to get stuffed. At the same time, she was a Duchess, and I was a changeling, and every bit of training I’d ever received was telling me to do whatever she said. The button continued to glow a steady red.
I looked at it, taking my time, trying to be careful. There was no iron in the thing, nothing that set my nerves on edge; just that faint, distant edge of impending lightning. Still cautious, I reached over and pressed the button.
Pain lanced though my finger as a needle hidden in the center of the red dot jabbed out and stabbed me. I jerked away, shedding drops of blood as I did, and staggered back. “You didn’t tell me that would happen!”
“I didn’t know. It didn’t happen when I tried the button.”
“Boobytraps aren’t usually that picky about who they hit.” I could feel my skin knitting itself together over the small injury. I forced myself not to watch.
The smell of impending lightning grew stronger as the server began to make a grinding sound like someone mashing peppercorns in a pestle. The button blinked off.
“Was that all?” asked Li Qin. “Draw blood, then go to sleep?”
“That was quite enough,” I said, sourly.
The button blinked back on, brighter this time, so bright it projected a fan of red light outward into the air, becoming almost physical. The smell of impending lightning sharpened to become the smell of ozone, hanging heavy all around us. Then, with another, brighter flash, the grinding stopped, and someone else was standing in the room.
She was young, maybe eleven or twelve, and looked Daoine Sidhe. Her hair was the incongruous yellow of buttercups blooming in a field, drawn into two low pigtails, and her eyes were the same honey-gold as my father’s, darker than August’s. Torquill eyes. She was wearing mortal clothes and mortal glasses, but her ears were pointed, and something about the shape of her face was achingly familiar.
She exhaled slowly, looking around the room before focusing on me and breaking into a wide, innocent grin. “There you are, October. I hoped you would come to reactivate me. How are you?”