Chains and Memory (23 page)

There had to be a reason. But sitting there in the darkness, with Julian at my side, I could not think what it might be.

The next morning we were like the walking dead, going through the motions of life without a trace of vitality. Julian ate breakfast; I didn't. He had a lot more practice than I did at keeping to routine, no matter what happened.

Eventually they would lower the shield, and I'd have my gifts back. If I was lucky and behaved myself, I might go the rest of my life without ever being gutted again; Julian claimed it was rarely done to adults.

But the threat would always be there. All it would take was a single touch, and the cage embedded in my soul would slam shut once more.

We hadn't said a word all morning. When I went to sit in the living room, though, Julian followed me, and stayed in the doorway while I sat. Eventually I looked up and met his gaze.

“I'm not giving up,” he said.

Of course he wasn't. He didn't know
how
. He'd made a promise to Neeya, a promise to me—a promise to himself. Maybe it was the
geas
mixing with his training, or maybe Julian would have always grown up to be the sort of person who would do everything he could, and more.

A spark flickered in the gloom of my mind.

My gaze settled on my hands, resting atop my knees, and stayed there as if moving would be too much distraction, would make me lose my train of thought.
Everything he could, and more.

“Julian,” I said slowly, working my way through one careful step at a time. “We've done everything we can think of to get rid of the shield. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Everything except the sidhe, because they weren't here before. Now they are, so we asked. And they—they refused.” Even saying it hurt. I'd thought . . .

That was a distraction, and not one I could afford right now. The next bit couldn't be delivered to my knees; I had to see his reaction. I lifted my chin. “There's another option.”

“No.” He spoke without hesitation, iron-hard. “I don't care what they said. We're not going to the Unseelie.”

I spread my mouth in something like a smile. “I'm glad we agree. But it proves my point: we haven't done
everything
. Only the rational things. The sane ones.”

He went very still.

It was a knack I'd never learned; I got up and started pacing instead. “For example: have you tried
asking?
”

“Asking who?”

“There are doctors who put these fucking things on wilders. Surely they could take it off again.”

I heard the sharp exhale, turned to see him staring at me. “Kim, there's no way they would do that.”

“Then we
make them
.”

He put one hand on the door jamb, as if my words had staggered him. Julian was staring at me like he'd never seen me before. And maybe he hadn't: the Kim who existed before the shield, before Falcon's refusal, would have never contemplated anything like this.

But she was gone.

Julian shook his head, a faint motion at first, then a forceful one. “No. For the love of—you can't be serious.”

“Why not?” My hands sought out my elbows, clamping down on them, arms hard against my body, as if to hold something in. Or to keep myself from lashing out. “I know it's crazy.
That's the point.
Julian, your entire goddamned
life
they have trained you to be disciplined, obedient. To sacrifice yourself for others, but never to ask for anything from them. Maybe you've been holding the keys to your own prison this entire time, because they knew you would never think to use them.” My eyes burned with the threat of tears—but not because of misery. Not this time.

He tried to come close, to take my hands in his, but I shied back. It left him alone in the middle of the living room, hands mid-air, silently pleading. “Kim . . . this isn't you. Threatening a doctor,
hurting
one? You wouldn't do that.”

“
Wouldn't I?
” The question ground from my throat, harsh and raw. The tears would become misery, if I let them. “Julian, this thing has made you insane. You went berserk last fall because of it, attacking doctors, nurses—remember that?” His flinch said that he did. “You think I'll survive it any better? It's killing me. I can't think about anything else. There's a hole inside me and nothing can fill it. You thought it might be different for me because I didn't grow up this way? It is. You know how to live with the shield, even if you hate doing so. I don't. I
can't.
”

I felt it then, in a weird, half-numb way: not the sensation itself, but its effect, and logic told me the cause. Julian was trying to enfold me in love and support, using his mind because I had spurned his arms.

I jerked upright, hands coming loose from their death-grips and slapping the wall behind me. I hadn't realized I'd retreated so far. “
Don't
,” I snarled. “Don't you fucking take this away from me, when I'm helpless to stop you.”

“I'm not trying to take anything away,” he whispered. Bright light slid down his face: the track of a tear. “But I don't have any other way to reach you. Kim . . . I can't let you do this. Not because I'm afraid of the risks, and not because of my training. Because I would
lose you
.”

It was too much. The cracks had been growing, though I tried desperately to hold them shut; the anguish in Julian's eyes broke them wide open. I sagged against the wall, slid limp to the ground. The sound that came out of me was as much a scream as a sob.

Because Julian was right. I couldn't do it. And even if I could . . . I didn't want to be the person who would come out the other side.

Not even if she was free of the shield.

Julian was at my side an instant later, arms around me, holding me tight against him. Even as I cried, a part of me remembered what Neeya had said, her memory of Julian comforting her. This was what it meant to be a wilder: not the powerful gifts, not the numinous presence that made other people shy away. Crying on a floor with the only person in the world who could understand how hopeless your situation was.

When my breath finally started to slow, Julian spoke, in a quiet, hesitant voice. “You were half right, you know.”

“What?” I sniffed hard, trying to clear my nose.

“About the training. About the fact that we've tried all the rational things. But you were half wrong, too.” Curled up against his chest, I could feel his breathing, settling into a steady pace I recognized. It was Julian bringing himself under control, even as he faced something that unnerved him. “I
have
thought about other ways. I just can't—couldn't—bring myself to try them.”

The correction made me stir, pulling back so I could look at him. “You have an idea?”

“Yes.” His gaze was bleak. “But it's dangerous. I'd gladly risk my life to get rid of this thing . . . but that wouldn't work. To have any chance of success, I'd have to risk your life instead.”

Tension thrummed in every muscle of his body. I didn't have to ask why. It wasn't just that Julian loved me and didn't want to see me hurt. Robert had thrown this in my face last fall, when this entire business was getting started:
For the love of all the gods, Kim, he's
Fiain
! Endangering others is their cardinal sin!

I was Fiain now, too. But that didn't mean Julian would be any happier about putting me in the line of fire.

My lips were dry against my tongue. “Tell me.”

He let out a slow breath, closed his eyes and tilted his head against the wall. “I tried it once. Several times, actually. I think most wilders do, at one point or another. Neeya was gutted; I wasn't. So I took apart her outer shields and went exploring, trying to find the root of the deep shield.”

“You couldn't find it.”

“No. But that was before I'd gone to Welton, before I studied with Grayson.”

He'd taken every shielding course he could sign up for, even aspects no Guardian ever bothered to study. No doubt there were still things he didn't know—but he'd definitely have a better chance. “So where's the risk?”

Julian opened his eyes, but his gaze remained fixed upward, as if looking at me might make him lose his nerve. “What I know now might give me a chance of taking apart the shield, but it won't help me find the foundation. I couldn't get deep enough, even with Neeya's defenses utterly gone. The surgeons who do this . . . Medina Perez's invention couldn't have just been a new design of shield. It had to be that
and
a way to install it. Which means she created a technique that lets you go deep into someone else's spirit—deeper than anybody normally goes.” His shoulder shifted beneath me; I realized it was a shrug. “I don't know that technique. Nobody's ever going to teach it to me. But now there's another way.”

Now.
Something new, something that came with the sidhe.

Something that would let you go deep into the spirit of another person.

My own body was rigid now. I knew where he was headed, knew exactly why he didn't want to do this. The thought alone filled me with dread.

More dread than living with the shield for the rest of your life?

The answer to that was easy.

“There's a high chance it's being sold on the street—or will be soon, if it isn't already,” I said. “According to my predictions. But I have no idea how to get my hands on any of it.”

Julian changed position, rising to his knees and cupping my face between his hands. “I don't know what this would do to you, Kim. It cranks your gifts up, but you can't
use
them right now. I can't begin to predict what will happen when those two things collide. And even if it works like I hope it will—if it blows you wide open—” We were close enough that I could hear his teeth grind. “I'm not a surgeon. If I find the root of the shield, I'll do what I can to take it apart, but I can't guarantee I won't hurt you in the process.”

I knew without even asking that he would lie down for this procedure in a heartbeat. If he were the one gutted and I had my gifts, he'd put himself under the metaphorical knife. But I didn't have his knowledge of shield theory; I wouldn't even know where to begin on something as complex as the deep shield must be. The only way we stood a chance was if he was the one going after it.

I knew something else, too. If I told Neeya about this, she would trigger her own shield on the spot and volunteer herself in my place. Not out of concern for me, but out of complete and unquestioning trust in Julian. And he would almost certainly accept the trade.

I couldn't show the slightest hint of hesitation or doubt.

“I trust you,” I said, and I meant it. “Now let's figure out how to get our hands on some fairy dust.”

~

We had to move quickly, before the doctors declared me sufficiently recovered and deactivated the shield. For this to work, I
had
to be gutted; only then would I be incapable of fighting back against Julian's invasion. “General anaesthesia of the soul,” I was calling it, putting the tiniest positive spin on my current state.

Not that we didn't have a fallback plan. Once the doctors cleared me, they would give me the trigger for my own shield. Every wilder had their own, for use in extremis; that was how Julian had been able to teach me his. I could gut myself at any time for this attempt. There were two problems with that, though, the second being that if Julian failed to remove the foundation of shield from me, I would have to go begging to the authorities to have it lowered again—and they would
certainly
have questions as to what had happened. But that all presumed I made it past the first problem: finding the nerve to gut myself in the first place.

On the whole, I preferred to get the entire thing over with
now
.

Julian made the arrangements at a distance, contacting Neeya telepathically. Everything she told him was confidential, and could get her disbarred from Guardianship if anybody found out she'd spilled the beans — but she didn't make a single protest, or ask a single question. She told us the Guardians had tracked down where my attacker got his fairy dust from; the dealer was in jail, being questioned about
his
source. “No prize for guessing the Unseelie,” I said bitterly. “But if there's one dealer in town, there's got to be two. Do the Guardians have any leads on others?”

“No need,” Julian said. “The dust they confiscated is still sitting in the evidence lockup.”

My heart started beating much too fast. It was one thing to ask Neeya to share information. Stealing evidence . . .

We didn't have to ask her, and might not have been able to stop her if we wanted to. Neeya claimed afterward that it had been embarrassingly easy. The lockup was warded against outside interference, of course, but she got a tour from another Guardian, and teleported a dose out of the bag and into one she'd brought. She got it to me in the same way: a plastic ziplock covered in warding runes appeared in my shopping bag while I was on my way home from the grocery store. I twitched in surprise when I realized it was there, but stopped myself before I could look around for Neeya. Until they lowered the shield, I was still under SIF watch, and didn't want to give her away.

But we couldn't carry out this ritual in our apartment, with an agent hanging around outside—not to mention all my neighbors, who would be caught in the blast if things went badly. Nor could we take over Toby's basement. Julian hadn't even told Neeya what we were planning; he just told her we needed a supply of fairy dust. We had to find another place to go.

“It has to be someplace heavily shielded, or else away from
everybody
,” Julian said. “It isn't just that we don't want to attract attention. You're going to be completely vulnerable. I can put some protections around the two of us that will help, but your mind has to be totally unguarded. I don't want something wandering in while I'm busy.”