Chains and Memory (10 page)

“Then convince her.”

Julian almost laughed. It would be like trying to persuade a stone to bend. “And risk her reporting me to someone? Besides, she isn't the only one who can do the math. If she knew the secret and was likely to tell me, the DSPA would never have let me anywhere near her classes.”

Neeya scowled, but any counter-argument she offered would have been simple petulance, and they both knew it. And she'd grown up since he went to Welton, because she didn't indulge herself anyway. There was a time she would have argued until her voice gave out, just to have something to do.

She took the memory stone back and began wiping its traces. “So what now?”

He put one hand on her elbow, with gentle pressure. She nodded and began walking with him back to Toby and Marcus' townhouse. “Maybe we break it the mundane way,” Julian said. “If we can win the case—get the Supreme Court to hear it and rule in Kim's favor—or have the law changed to protect her, that's a crack in their defenses. Hard to say
we
have to remain shielded, when she isn't.”

Neeya didn't respond to that, but her control had never been the best. He could feel her suspicion. For her, the world had always been divided into Us and Them, and They were never to be trusted very far. Being out would cure her of that, he hoped. Fiain had to work with outside authorities in the course of their duties. He didn't expect her to pin her hopes on Congress or the courts, but she might at least be persuaded to accept Kim.

None of that was anything he could say to her, though. Nor could he voice his other thought, because it was too distant of a possibility, and he didn't want to get Neeya's hopes up.

The sidhe rarely worked magic in the ways humans did. For them it was instinctual, though they could and did train to develop certain abilities more fully. Still, there was every reason to think they could do what Julian could not: find the roots of the shield, and cut them out.

If he could convince them to do it. If he could even talk to a sidhe again. That woman with her petition outside the Metro had been ridiculous, but her words had lodged under his skin and stuck there. Never mind letting the sidhe “come home” or being reunited with creatures that had been his cousins thousands of years ago. He needed their knowledge, their help.

Julian was patient. If it took ten years for the balance between the worlds to be sorted out so that humans and sidhe could live together once more, he would wait.

In the meanwhile, he would keep looking for the key.

~

After three weeks of training with Guan, I felt like my brain was going to start leaking if I crammed one more psychic technique into it.

I hadn't mastered everything he'd thrown at me. That would take time and practice — more time and practice than I'd had so far. But Guan at least made sure I understood the principles, even if I couldn't execute them correctly at speed, on my first try. I could guess at his reasoning: we had no idea how long we'd be able to continue with this setup. If he got pulled away, by his duties or somebody interfering, he wanted to leave me with as much as he could.

It was a relief to have an evening partially off. Julian and Neeya had the basement to themselves tonight; he was teaching her some of the reflective shield techniques he'd gotten from Grayson, and it wasn't safe for us to be in the room with them. Guan and I were upstairs in the living room, talking about the law.

We weren't alone. Toby was on duty that night, but Marcus wandered in and out, and he had other guests besides. Word had gotten around that Julian and I were at their townhouse most nights; one by one, it seemed like every wilder in D.C. was showing up to look me over. Some of them stayed to practice or to talk.

There were two others with us in the living room. One was a newcomer, a woman named Inola who looked like she had some Native American ancestry. The other was a black guy named Louis, who had been here a few times before. I didn't know much about either of them beyond that, but wasn't sure if asking more would be prying.

I'd settled myself into the armchair, with Hitomi curled up in my lap. She purred and turned her head when I scratched her cheek, leaning into the touch.

Guan was explaining some of the laws that addressed civilian intervention in psychic problems. As in so many other respects, I fell into a weird grey zone: wilders who had reached the age of majority were required by law to offer assistance when they could, and could be held liable for failure to do so. Ordinary bloods, on the other hand, fell under the umbrella of “Good Samaritan” laws, which varied widely from one jurisdiction to another. Until my legal status was settled one way or another, the only safe course of action was for me to offer aid, and hope I didn't do anything I could be sued for.

It wasn't very a comforting answer.

But it was more comforting than thinking about the results of my divination the previous week. I'd mapped out three variant scenarios, but even the best of them still wasn't very good: people
would
try to get hold of this stuff, and when they did, some of them would die. Baselines would probably just become psychic, but psychics would turn into wilders — if they were lucky. I didn't think we had the medical technology to stop the mutation once it began. At that point, it was a roll of the dice whether the user survived or not.

I hadn't told Julian anything about that. I couldn't: the woman I'd met with, a suit from some government agency she hadn't bothered to identify, had required me to sign a non-disclosure agreement that I wouldn't share information about that with
anyone
unless authorized to do so. Authorization had not been forthcoming. I didn't even know who to ask to get an update; I could only guess at what actions they might be taking to minimize the threat.

For my own sanity, I had to focus on other things. And it occurred to me that I had a good audience for one of those, right there in the living room with me.

“Can I ask a technical question?” I said, when Guan seemed to have reached the end of his spiel.

“Of course,” he said. “About the law, or something psychic?”

“Something psychic. But the law too, I guess.” I shifted in my chair, suddenly self-conscious. Hitomi meeped a protest and extended her claws, not scratching me, but pricking to send a warning. Too late, it occurred to me that the Fiain might see this as outsiders intruding on their business. “The deep shield. This whole fight about putting it on me — it's gotten me thinking. Is there any alternative to it? Some other way to keep kids safe, without having to gut them?” The official term was “stripping,” but that wasn't how wilders referred to it amongst themselves. I'd picked up their habit.

Louis had been reading while Guan and I talked, but at my words he put down his book. Inola's drifting attention snapped to me. I occupied my hands petting Hitomi, to hide my nerves.

Guan said. “Do we have an alternative? No.”

He left it at that. We were all psychic; he could tell I wasn't asking idly, and I could tell he could tell. I sighed. “All right. Julian and I have some friends — Robert Ó Conchúir and Liesel Mandelbaum. Has he told you about them? When they found out about the deep shield, they started trying to think of other ways to handle the problem.”

“Have they come up with anything?” Louis asked.

I snorted. “Oh, they've come up with lots of things. Just none that work. Their best idea so far involves designing a new kind of power reservoir, one that can be built by an outsider, and bleeding off all the energy into that until the kid's old enough to tap into it.”

“Ye
gods
,” Inola said, coming bolt upright on the couch. “Do you have the slightest clue how much power would build up in there? Those children would be sitting on small nuclear bombs.”

I shrugged helplessly. “Like I said, none of their ideas work. But —” I hesitated, looking down at Hitomi's fluffy head. “I thought you guys might be able to help. If you wanted to.”

Silence followed my words. Then Louis said, “We're trained to be Guardians. Emergency response. It doesn't set us up for the kind of technical work you're talking about.”

“Maybe not most of you,” I admitted. “But Guan — you train these kids. And more to the point, you know the people at the Centers who
raise
them. Would they want to look into alternatives?”

His expression had settled into the bland mask they were all taught to maintain. I read that as a good sign; it meant I'd given him something to think about. Hopefully what he was thinking wasn't
this girl is insane
. His answer was neutral. “I couldn't say.”

There wasn't much point in backpedaling now. “Would you be willing to ask them? Or I'll do it myself, if you tell me who to talk to. I —”

Pounding footsteps on the basement staircase cut me short. The wards on the room soundproofed the place, but they didn't extend to the stairs. Guan came to his feet just as the door slammed open, revealing Neeya. “Kleenex,” she said, eyes darting around the room. “I need —” She spotted the box on a shelf, teleported it straight into her hands, and bolted back downstairs.

I followed her in time to see her pressing a tissue to Julian's face, while he tilted his head forward. There were bloodstains all down the front of his shirt.

For all my speed, Guan had beaten me down the stairs. I was willing to bet he'd witnessed scenes like this more than once in his teaching career. “What happened?” he asked.

Julian took Neeya's hand by the wrist, gently pulling her away so he could hold the tissues himself. “My fault,” he said, his voice thickened as he pinched his nose shut. “I didn't tend my own shields well enough.”

“It's
my
fault,” Neeya said, hovering with one hand on his shoulder. “I reflected a bolt right into his face.”

Inola and Louis had both joined us, at a more leisurely pace. Louis went to kneel by Julian; after a moment, I realized he was applying a finely-controlled cryokinetic effect, counteracting any swelling that might occur, and helping stop the blood flow. “Thanks,” Julian said. “Nothing's broken. It'll be fine in a little bit.”

“Surprisingly careless of you,” Guan observed.

The sound Julian made probably would have been a snort, if he hadn't still been pinching off the blood. “Bad habits, sir. A bit of one-upsmanship — we won't do it again.”

Which implied they'd done it before. Well, they'd grown up together, and even wilders couldn't be sensible every waking minute. I went and sat by Julian's feet, across from Louis. He gave me a wry smile past the tissues. I said, “At least she didn't light your hair on fire.”

“I only did that once —!” Neeya caught herself and subsided to a glare. I hadn't even meant it as a dig at her. It was just the sort of thing my parents said when I had mishaps during my own adolescent manifestation.

Guan said, “I think you're done for the night, Julian. Once the bleeding stops, why don't you and Kim go home.”

I resisted the urge to ask what he thought of my request. If he was in favor of it, I would find out in due course; if not, I didn't think pressing right away would improve anything. At least I had planted the seed. For now, that would have to be enough.

~

Mostly people avoided looking at the wilders on the Metro, but the stains on Julian's shirt earned us some stares on our way back home that night.

I wondered what the people on the train thought had happened. Probably something dramatic involving Guardian duties. Maybe a group of anti-sidhe punks who, deprived of their Otherworldly targets, turned on the nearest substitutes available. I was half-tempted to start making up a story, talking to Julian like we'd just fought off a dragon in Dupont Circle, but it would probably just remind him that he wasn't a Guardian yet. Instead I sat quietly, trying not to sway into him when the train slowed at each station.

When we got back to the apartment, Julian plucked at his bloodstained shirt and said, “I should put this in the wash.”

“Let me grab some other laundry,” I said, ducking into the bedroom to fetch it. My parents, thank the gods, had put me in an apartment with its own washer and dryer. We didn't have to go down to the basement or out to a laundromat.

By the time I'd gathered enough to fill the washer, Julian had already tossed his shirt in and was standing bare-chested in the hall. I dropped the other clothes at his feet and slid past him into the living room, eyes averted. It wasn't so much that I was embarrassed to see my boyfriend with his shirt off—though it was a little awkward, given how uncertain our physical interactions still were. But when I looked at him, I saw the scars: a knife cut along his chest, burns on his abdomen. I'd done those things to him. And physical healers like my father were rare enough that nobody was going to waste their talents on erasing the scars from one wilder, just for my peace of mind.

Julian wasn't nearly blind enough to miss my reaction. He stayed in the hall for a moment, loading the wash; then I heard him go into the bedroom and put on another shirt. I sat on the couch and wrapped my hands around my knees, knowing he was going to come in, unsure of what I would say when he did.

He paused in the doorway and asked softly, “Is it the scars?”

“Yes,” I said—and then, realizing the truth, “No.”

He waited, letting me fight my way through to the words. They were surprisingly hard to get out: I was suddenly on the edge of crying, and really didn't want to give in. It felt manipulative, like I was trying to use my emotions as leverage against him. And I wanted to keep my dignity.

At last I said, “It's Neeya.”

The room was quiet enough that I heard his indrawn breath.

“I'm not an idiot,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. My gaze was fixed on my knees. “I don't think you're in love with her, and I'm not jealous. Not—not like that. But you're different with her; did you know that? She's the one person you don't avoid touching. I know I need to keep my distance, and I do my best . . . but it's hard to do that, and then to see you so comfortable with her, and not feel the lack.”