Tinker by Wen Spencer

crawl ahead.
    "There's Nathan's twenty-car accident." Oilcan indicated a score of wrecked cars and trucks sitting under the floodlights of the stadium parking lot. It wasn't difficult to guess which vehicle had been involved in the fatality. A red vehicle, make unrecognizable, sat to one side, smashed into an accordion two feet tall. "How do you suppose they managed that in this type of traffic?"
    "One of the semis lost its load." Tinker pointed out the haphazardly loaded trailer. "It must have landed on the—minivan?—beside it." The parking lot's entrances, she noticed, had Earth Interdimensional Agency barricades up, and police tape strung at chest height about the cars created an imaginary fence. "Looks like someone got caught smuggling in the deal."
    Judging by the amount of police tape and number of armed men, the EIA, the international agency in charge of almost everything in Pittsburgh even vaguely related to the elves, had stumbled onto a large illegal shipment. There were three tractor-trailer trucks, a dozen large Ryder and U-Haul box trucks, four pickup trucks, and the squashed car—any of which could have been the smuggler's vehicle. Unless they had been part of a convoy, it seemed strange that the EIA had impounded the whole lot.
    "That Peterbilt is nearly new." The traffic opened up for a few hundred feet. Oilcan grunted slightly as he put in the clutch in order to shift out of first gear into second gear. The clutch in the flatbed, an ancient 2010 Ford F750, was stiff; Tinker nearly had to stand on it to shift when she drove. "It wouldn't take much to get it back to running."
    Tinker drooled at it for a minute. "Yeah, but unless it's the smuggling vehicle and thus no one is willing to claim it, someone will have already made arrangements to get their truck back next Shutdown."
    "One can dream." Oilcan grunted through another shift back down to first as they dropped to a crawl.
    Speaking of next Shutdown . . . "I told Lain that I'd go to CMU for a term."
    "You're kidding." He looked at her as if she had suddenly transformed into something slightly repulsive and totally unexpected, like one of those ugly pug dogs.
    "It'll only be ninety days, and I'd get a chance to see what Earth is like."
    "I've lived there," Oilcan pointed out. "Everything is too big. You can spend all day looking at thousands of people and not see a single person that you know."
    They eased up onto the Fort Duquesne Bridge. Below them, barges choked the Ohio, the Allegheny, and the Monongahela rivers. It seemed possible to walk from one shore to the other without touching water. It happened every time Pittsburgh returned to Earth; trade goods coming and going by land, water, and air. She didn't want to think about living someplace this crowded all the time.
    "You're not helping," she said.
    "It's another world, Tinker. If you don't like it, you'll be stuck and miserable."
    "Maybe I'll like it."
    He shrugged. "Maybe. I don't think so. You hate having someone telling you what to do. Think about it. You're going for classes. You've never been to a regular school. Classes start exactly at eight a.m. Bang. A bell rings and you have to be sitting in your seat, quiet, facing forward. And you sit there, without talking, for hours, while you study what the teacher wants you to learn."
    "Maybe college is different. Lain seems to think it's a good idea."
    "And Lain likes to putter around in the garden, planting flowers. You tried that once. Remember how crazy it drove you."
    "I already told Lain yes."
    He scowled at her, and then focused on getting through the city.
    Downtown, despite it being almost ten o'clock, was filled with activity. Stores were sorting hastily delivered goods, preparing for the Startup rush. Once the stores sold out, there would be no more until next Shutdown. Fall fashions were appearing in the windows; anyone who didn't buy early might be facing the Pittsburgh winter without gloves and sweaters.
    The delivery drivers who