Chains and Memory (14 page)

By the time I met Julian in the downstairs lobby of FAR's building, I had a monster of a headache building at the base of my skull. It must have showed, too. Julian put his hand on my arm and gave me a look of concern. “Are you sure you want to go to practice tonight?”

“Yes,” I said, hitching my bag higher on my shoulder. “Especially since this may be my last chance for a while.”

The stillness of his body showed his alarm. I waved it off. “Nothing apocalyptic. Well, I hope not. But with the new agreement in place, my mother can take a break from maintaining the planar injunction and the eighteen other things she's been juggling alongside it. She's planning to come up here for few days, to see what she help she can give me on the political end.”

My legal affairs were out of all of our hands at this point. Lotze had filed the cert petition with the Supreme Court, which meant nine Justices were currently pondering whether my case was worthy to be heard in their august chambers. He was confident they would grant cert, given the constitutional importance of my case and its potential consequences for me. Even then, though, he'd have only half an hour to persuade at least five Justices to side with me. The rest was all on paper: the findings in the previous trials, the lengthy transcripts of testimony from more than a dozen expert witnesses.

The political side, by contrast, was in too many hands to count. The bill was stalled out in conference, all sides digging their heels in. I had an ACLU representative doing what he could to help me, along with a lobbyist my mother had hired, but she had a few personal connections she could leverage, in the hope of persuading someone to break the deadlock. It was more than I could do myself, and I was grateful to her for the help.

Julian said, “Falcon came to me in the park today. Alone — I don't know how he managed that. His people are worried by how willing our side is to deal with the Unseelie. I've got him looking for proof that they attacked you before the injunction was lifted, but I promised I'd do what I could on my own. Is there any chance your mother could look into that, too?”

I snorted. “Ask her to campaign against the creatures that turned her daughter into a wilder? I don't know; it's an awful stretch.”

It wasn't supposed to be a reminder of the tension between us, but Julian heard the buried meaning anyway. “I'll ask Toby and Marcus if they can put me up until she's gone.”

“You don't have to do that,” I said, but it was a reflexive response. I had run the scenario a dozen times in my head this afternoon, in every variation I could think of. Telling my mother I was living with Julian. Not telling her, and hoping she didn't stop by my apartment. Hiding his belongings in the back of the closet; he didn't own much. No matter which way I spun my approach, it ended badly — I didn't need divination to tell me that.

Except this one: Julian moving out for the duration, and coming back when the coast was clear.

He knew as well as I did that my protest was my heart talking, not my head. He took my hand in a reassuring grip. “It won't be for long. And you have enough to deal with already; you don't need the extra trouble.”

Knowing he was right didn't make me any happier. “I hate this,” I mumbled, gripping his hand hard in return.

Julian didn't answer that. What could he say? We both knew it couldn't be fixed with words. “Come on,” he said instead. “Guan and Neeya will be waiting for us.”

~

The apartment felt empty with Julian gone.

It wasn't a matter of physical absences. Most of what he owned was in storage at Welton, awaiting the university reopening or, more likely, him leaving school for good. The rest wasn't much: clothes, a few books, his port. It barely filled a suitcase.

But I'd grown used to having him there. I'd come to
rely
on it. I didn't realize how quickly I'd adjusted to the little casual touches until they were gone. I felt cold and alone, and melodramatic for feeling that way. And I resented my mother for depriving me of that support, all in the name of her own comfort.

It wasn't fair, and I knew it. She hadn't asked Julian to move out. She hadn't
known
to ask. Maybe I was wrong; maybe she would have coped with it after all. But I couldn't bring myself to test it.

At least she was helping as much as she could on other fronts. “I'm optimistic,” she said her fourth night in town, over dinner at a local Tibetan restaurant. “The vote itself will be a nightmare, of course. Enormous bills always are. People can agree on ninety-five percent of the substance, and fight like wet cats in a sack over the remaining five. But it doesn't sound like Ramos needs to trade anything to get your part of the law included. She just needs to not trade
you
in exchange for something else.”

The prospect twisted my stomach. I poked at my spicy laping, trying to muster the appetite for it. “Do you think she's likely to?”

“Of her own free will? No.” My mother paused for a bite. No amount of stress ever seemed to kill her appetite. She'd even kept on eating when Noah was in the hospital, dying of psi-sickness. I'd hated her for that back then, thinking it meant she didn't care. “But it's possible she could be pressured into it by other members of her party. The Progressives may be sympathetic to you, but if they have to sacrifice your happiness for the greater good of the nation, they will. Our job is to make certain they don't.”

By which she meant,
her
job. I hated being so useless.

But I could work on things other than my own problem. “What about the Unseelie? Are we really going to be making nice with them?” I hadn't told her that Falcon had approached Julian. I didn't have to. It was enough that the Unseelie were out there in public.

My mother said, “I honestly don't know. But Kim, you have to bear in mind that what happened last fall may have been the work of individuals, not sanctioned by their leadership. You can't assume the entire Unseelie Court is like the ones you dealt with.”

So much for eating more of my dinner. “I can't? I was
one of them
. They're not—not robots or anything, or a hive mind. But being Unseelie wasn't just an issue of eye color, either. It was attitude, goals—” I fought for words, tried to remember how I'd described it before, when agents and other officials were questioning me from dawn to dusk. The phrases wouldn't come. “Where did that come from, if not from some kind of controlling force across the whole Court?”

“That was
your
experience of it,” my mother said, with surprising gentleness. Not that it did much good. “Are you certain the same is true for the sidhe?”

I was, down to the bone. But I didn't have any proof other than gut instinct, and the lack was driving me up the wall. “Has their leadership
said
it was just a few rogue agents going after us? Staged a few show trials, made an example of them to please our observers? Who the hell
is
their leader, anyway?”

She shook her head, then sipped her tea. It was a stalling tactic, a chance for her to choose her next words. “I can't talk about that, Kim. But I promise you, I share your concerns.” She fixed me with a sharp gaze. “Have you had any more trouble recently?”

Even if I'd wanted to keep the Metro attack secret, Lotze would have told her. Attorney-client privilege covered what the two of us said to one another, but not incidents that got me investigated by SIF. Full disclosure was the safer course. “Not that I've noticed,” I said, sagging back in my chair. “Sorry, that sounds sarcastic. I don't mean it to be. I've been trying to keep an eye out in nine different directions at once, but nothing.” I wasn't about to tell her how many times I'd jumped at a shadow, and had to restrain myself from doing something that might make me look bad. Guan had taught me more subtle ways of scanning my surroundings — both magical and otherwise — which helped.

“I hope you're being careful,” my mother said. “Not being out in public alone, that sort of thing.”

“I've mostly stayed inside,” I said, in perfect truth. She didn't need to know that Toby and Marcus' townhouse was one of my refuges. Ever since my manifestation, she'd wanted me to study ceremonial magic . . . but I didn't think she'd be happy to know I was learning it from wilders now.

So many damned secrets. I hated keeping this from her. As soon as my legal situation was settled, I vowed, I would tell her what was really going on. Once I could spare the energy for a new source of stress.

She paid for dinner and walked me back to the apartment. I breathed a private sigh of relief that Julian had moved out. Just as I unlocked the door, though, my port rang. A quick glance showed me Toby's number. “I need to take this,” I said to my mother, trying to think of an excuse to keep the conversation private. “It's work. You go on in; I'll be there in a sec.”

FAR dealt with sensitive cases often enough that my mother didn't question my need for privacy. Once the door had shut behind her, I went a little distance down the hall and thumbed the call through, voice only, and put the speaker to my ear.

Part of me thought it might be Julian, using Toby's port to avoid having his name on my screen. But the voice on the other end was Toby's. “Kim? Can you spare a moment?”

“Um, sure—though if you can make it quick, that would be good. My mother's waiting for me.” Would she listen at the door? I told myself that was just paranoia talking.

Toby seemed to be thinking along similar lines. Or maybe the paranoia was habit for him. “In that case, keep your answers as bland as you can. You're aware the Fiain are trained in divination, right?”

Wilders were trained in
everything
, at least to a point. “Mostly cards and runes, right?”

“Yes. You performed a divination recently on a certain topic—one that shall remain nameless, because it's classified. Imagine that information on this topic was subsequently passed to the Guardian Corps, and they conducted their own inquiries.”

Fairy dust.
Now I understood why Toby had warned me to be circumspect. “Okay, I follow.” My fingers cramped around my port.

“I was searching for flash-points,” Toby said. “Places where trouble might start, where a timely intervention might head it off at the pass. What I got was a warning. About you.”

My pulse sped up before he said it, as if anticipating the words. “What did it indicate?”

“The runes—I think they're warning me that what you experienced before isn't over. Its effects aren't finished. And what follows next will be worse.”

I sagged against the wall, slid down until I was crouched on the carpet, curled around my port.
Worse.
I still woke up sometimes in the middle of the night, body twisted in remembered agony. I had burned for centuries when the Unseelie put that drug in my system. When I'd come out the far side, I'd been their faithful ally, almost to the bone. What could be worse than that?

If Toby was right, I might be about to find out.

I should go to the hospital. Except that doctors had checked me out already, a dozen of them, from an army physician before I left Welton to a trio of specialists from the CDC. They'd scanned my brain, tested my blood, run the Krauss test again to calculate my new rating. What could they possibly have missed that they would find now?

Through numb lips, I said, “Is there anything I can do?”

“Be careful,” Toby said. “I wish I could be more specific. But yes, I think you can avoid it—if you're careful.”

Some instinct for secrecy was still alive, because I didn't say,
Thank you, that's very fucking helpful.
Or maybe it was just manners. Toby was trying to help, even if he wasn't doing a very good job. Wilders learned only the basics of divination. It wasn't a surprise he hadn't gotten more.

Maybe I could do better.

Not tonight, though. I needed to get a bit of distance before I attempted anything like this personal of a question—or maybe ask somebody at FAR for help. I pushed myself back to my feet. “Okay. Thank you; I'll see what I can do.”

“Would you like to talk to Julian?”

Of course I would. It wasn't a good idea, though, not right now, with my mind still reeling and my mother waiting inside my apartment. “I'll call him later.”

“All right,” Toby said, and then, “I'm sorry, Kim.”

I didn't even say good-bye. I just hung up.

I crouched a moment longer in the hallway, gripping my port in stiff fingers. Should I tell my mother? I'd be an idiot not to—but what happened to me last fall had triggered all her old protective instincts, the hurt of a mother who'd lost a child to the psi-sickness. Half the tension between us now was because of the conflictbetween her grief and her aversion to wilders. She'd kind of lost her shit when she heard how close I came to dying. To tell her the risk wasn't gone . . .

And I would have to tell her how I knew. Even if I had the wits to make up a story right now, the last thing I needed was another lie to keep track of while I dealt with this. “Fuck it,” I muttered, then shoved off the wall and went into my apartment.

I stopped in my tracks, just inside the door.

My mother was standing in the middle of the living room, hands clenched at her sides, practically vibrating with tension. Her shields were buttoned up tight and her face was like a mask. Had she been listening after all? I didn't think I'd said anything to Toby that would sound suspicious from the outside, but—

“You lied to me.”

I closed the door with one blind hand, unable to take my eyes off my mother. “What?”

“He's been here. He's been
living
with you.”

Julian.

Anger brought me forward; I had to stop myself from getting right up in her face. “You went
snooping
while I was out in the hall?”