Chains and Memory (6 page)

It was hardly a statement to put Julian at ease. He ducked into the pedestrian alley between two buildings, going far enough back that no one on the street would be able to easily overhear. “I didn't set you any task.”

“You most certainly did. I recall it distinctly: you told me about the deep shield — which, I should add, you might have done
far
sooner — I responded with suitable shock and horror, and you told me there was no alternative that would keep young wilders safe.”

Julian controlled a wince. “Tell me you haven't been looking for ways to break the shield.”

“Of course not. Your expertise in such matters far exceeds my own — and besides which, there is no Fiain here I might study. Unless you come to Galway or, and this would be preferable, arrange to have me brought to where you are, I have nowhere to begin.” Robert's image receded slightly, and Julian realized he was in a chair, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest in satisfaction. “No, I have been contemplating measures that might
replace
this abominable shield, so that future generations will not suffer its chains.”

A flight of concrete stairs led up to an impersonal, grey-painted door. Julian sat on the bottom step, resisting the urge to drop his head into his hands. “Gods help us all. Tell me.”

“Well,” Robert said. “I first attempted to calculate how many minders would be needed to maintain ordinary shields on a child of unusual strength, every waking and sleeping hour. Of course it was only a rough estimate — but I feel confident in saying the answer was, too many.”

By Julian's own estimate, it would require at least four: three working eight-hour shifts, in rotation with a fourth to allow for time off, backup in case of emergency, and so forth. Four if they were Fiain; if it were normal bloods, at least twice as many. And that was per child. He didn't know how many Fiain were born in the United States every year — the number couldn't be
that
high — but it hardly mattered. Nobody would pour out those kinds of resources for them.

Robert had paused, giving Julian a chance to argue, and continued on when he did not. “Then I considered how one might construct a safe environment in which to house such a child, wherein their gifts might be allowed free rein, without harm to them. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that such an environment would have to be
exceedingly
bare. Completely so, in fact. And when I mentioned this to Liesel, she asked me if I had ever heard of something called a ‘Skinner box.'”

“You brought Liesel into this?”

“Whyever should I not? She knows a good deal more than I do about child development, which is to say she knows anything at all.”

There was a note in his voice that Julian recognized all too well. “Robert — how many people have you shared this with?”

His gaze drifted away from the camera, toward something off-screen. He might as well have whistled to indicate innocence. “Kim's tie to the Palladian Circle may have been cut, and strictly speaking this is not an issue that would help
her
—”

”Seven of you, then,” Julian said. The Wiccan Circle Liesel and Robert belonged to practiced ritual magic, but only on a casual level. They wouldn't get far on their own. “Anyone else?”

“I may have raised the question with some people here at the Ardcholáiste. In a general way, of course, naming no names or specifics.” Robert grew defensive. “Look you: if my father is going to trap me into attending classes here, as was always his preference, then I might at least get
some
use out of it.”

Julian's annoyance was fading. In truth, it wasn't a bad idea. All his life, he'd been fixated on getting rid of the deep shield — but only for adults. Fiain fully grown and trained, ready to use their gifts at will. He'd taken the necessity of the shield itself as a fact of life, never considering that there might be alternatives.

Nobody had ever found one. But back when the shield was developed, the psychic sciences had been far less advanced. And why would anyone look for a replacement method, when they had one that worked so well?

That didn't make it likely that one half-trained Irish sorcerer and a motley assortment of other psychics would stumble on a solution. There wasn't any harm in them looking for one, though. “All right. I don't know what a Skinner box is, but I can tell you that a lot of the early deaths, before the deep shield, were from self-inflicted pyrokinesis. Even a bare room won't protect them from that.”

“Indeed. So I have begun to think more creatively.” Robert steepled his fingers. He was clearly enjoying this, and Julian couldn't begrudge it. He and Liesel, being foreigners, weren't much use in helping Kim with her legal problems, nor could they get Julian into the Guardian Corps. But if they came up with even a hint of a workable idea, then he and Kim could present it to the Division for Special Psychic Affairs, who oversaw the Centers for Wilder Education as well as the surgeons who installed the shield. It wouldn't be a quick fix — they would need to develop the idea, test it, make absolutely certain before it got written into the law — but it offered hope.

Even if Julian never managed to break the deep shield directly, he could help make certain those who came after wouldn't ever be gutted.

Robert had already rattled off a list of discarded possibilities while Julian's mind wandered. Now he was, in his characteristic long-winded manner, working up to something more promising, and Julian could see where he aimed. “A Kamiya shunt?”

“Precisely,” Robert said, looking only a little disgruntled that Julian had stolen his thunder. “If you can channel all the power elsewhere, before it takes shape, then the child will have no chance to harm anyone with it.”

“But where does the power
go?
”

Robert shrugged. “I had not got that far yet.”

Normally a Kamiya shunt was used to pass power from one psychic to another, in a more stable and controlled fashion than simply handing it off. If used on a child — “You'd end up turning them into batteries for other people to use.”

Robert's mobile face was capable of some truly impressive grimaces. “Ah. That . . . might be a problem.”

“If you could build a reservoir, though —” Julian stopped the sentence before it got very far. All the existing methods of creating power reservoirs had to be performed by the psychic himself; they couldn't be built with one person's power to contain someone else's.

“Has anyone ever tried to staple a Kamiya shunt
onto
a reservoir?”

Julian frowned. “You mean to channel the power in? The way Grayson taught me to do it, the structure of the conduit is almost the same —” He stopped again, this time because he realized where Robert aimed. “You mean, use the shunt to siphon off the kid's power, and try to build the reservoir with
that
.”

“I have no idea how one would do it,” Robert said. “Ordinarily, of course, one absorbs and integrates the power before doing anything with it. But if one could create — oh, call it — the psychic equivalent of robotic arms, to work with the power without taking it in.”

Technomagicians kept trying to come up with ways to do something like that, and hadn't succeeded yet. “Unlikely,” Julian said.

“If any of these were
easy
, someone would have thought of them by now. But no matter; I have other prospects to pursue. Mind you, Liesel tells me at least half of them are wildly unethical.”

It put a grin on Julian's face, which might have been what Robert intended. “If you come up with anything that's feasible and
won't
land you in prison, let me know.”

“Of course.” Robert hesitated, then said, “I did mean it, you realize, about coming out there. Should you find the slightest phantasm of a use for me —”

Julian nodded, and Robert left the thought unfinished. He knew it had killed Robert, flying home after Welton closed down. He didn't want to be in Ireland, no matter how good the curriculum was at the Ardcholáiste na Draíochta, and he wanted even less to leave behind friends in need. Short of sleeping on Kim's couch, though, he and Liesel had nowhere to go in the United States. Not with Welton closed.

“In the meanwhile,” Robert said, his tone deliberately light, “I will apply my creativity and will to this task. It is far more interesting than the work my professors have set me.”

A sudden clank behind Julian brought him to his feet. The man who had opened the door at the top of the staircase shied back, startled by the unexpected presence of a wilder. “I should go,” Julian said into his port, and began walking toward the street once more. “And Robert? Thank you.”

~

The office of Future Advisory Research had a glass front and a glass door, which meant I could see straight through into the lobby. Mariko was at the reception desk, and somebody was sitting in one of the chairs. A familiar silhouette: Stutler always sat perfectly straight, like he was at attention even when sitting. He made Julian look casual.

My steps slowed. I expected him to get in touch again after last night—but not to show up at my internship. He'd had seen me through the glass, though, so I had no choice but to go in. “Agent Stutler,” I said, trying not to sound nervous. “Is there a problem?”

“No, nothing serious,” he said, rising with the smoothness of someone whose job required him to stay in excellent shape. SIF agents might deal primarily with magic, but they had to be prepared for any kind of trouble. “We just need to talk to you about the incident last night—get the details down for the record.”

I couldn't hide my alarm. “Did you guys find the guy from the station? The one who ran away?” I almost said,
the one I attacked
. But Mariko was six feet away and all ears. I hadn't told anybody at FAR about the attack, and I didn't want to say anything that might get blown out of proportion by office gossip.

Stutler must have been thinking the same thing, because he extended one arm, not quite touching my shoulder. “I can give you the full details at the office. Mr. Hodgson has agreed to spare you for the afternoon—though I doubt it will take that long.”

Sometimes it seemed like I was taking more time off from my internship than I spent working at it. It was a miracle Adam hadn't just given up and fired me. I sighed, grimaced an apology at Mariko, and said, “Let's get this over with.”

Stutler drove us across the Potomac to the SIF offices, not far from Union Station. They were housed in the Toorawa Building, constructed after First Manifestation, with new high-tech materials that included no iron at all. Psychic security here depended on wards, not iron fences.

He took me up to a room I'd visited before. Or maybe it wasn't the same; maybe they had a dozen rooms like it, nondescript little offices with video cameras to record testimony. I'd spent grueling hours here last December and January recounting my entire experience with the sidhe, from the tarot reading on my birthday that warned of catastrophic change to the night Julian and I battled one another and he freed me from the Unseelie.

Another man waited for us there, a stocky fellow who introduced himself as Arav Kutty. He gestured for me to sit in front of the camera. “I'm used to the drill,” I said wryly, and settled in for what I hoped would be a short session.

Stutler asked the questions, revisiting the things I'd told him last night, digging down for more detail. When I asked again, he told me the man I'd accidentally attacked had filed a report with the local police. “Shit,” I said, involuntarily. “I'm sorry. What's—no, you probably can't tell me his name. I'd like to talk to him, though. To apologize.”

“I'll see what I can arrange,” Stutler said.

Kutty had been alternately taking notes and paging through a folder whose contents I couldn't see. Now he spoke up for the first time. “Three weeks ago, on the fourteenth of March, you had a verbal altercation with a woman in the street—one Melissa Peters.”

I winced, then thought,
I shouldn't have done that.
The camera missed nothing. Oh, for Julian's self-control. “Yeah,” I admitted. “She was wearing gold contact lenses. I saw them and thought for a moment that she was Unseelie.” It was a big fad now, green lenses to look Seelie, or gold ones for the countercultural types who thought being evil was cool. That was the first I'd seen of it, though, and I'd been having a shitty day, things going wrong every five minutes. When I caught a glimpse of gold eyes in my peripheral vision, my frayed temper leapt to the wrong conclusion. “But it definitely wasn't a person in gold lenses this time. It was a glamour of a sidhe, and a well-crafted one at that. Not something your average psychic could manage. Especially since most of them haven't seen more than a few pictures of the sidhe on the news.”

He turned to another page, not responding to my point. “You also had an incident in a Wilson Boulevard grocery store on the twentieth of March. It says here that you hurled soup cans down the aisle telekinetically.”

“What?” I stared at him, open-mouthed. “How did you—I didn't
hurl
them. I was trying to
catch
the damn things. I had my backpack on, and there was this whole pyramid of cans; I must have hit it or something. They started to fall down, and I tried to stop it, but they were going everywhere and my control slipped.”

As soon as the word came out of my mouth, I wished I could take it back.

Control.

Kutty closed the file. Standard law enforcement officer behavior, straight out of a show; this was to tell me he meant business. “Ms. Argant-Dubois. I understand that following the closure of Welton University and your departure on December twenty-third, you returned to your parents' house in Atlanta, Georgia, where you remained until February nineteenth. Then you moved here, to begin your internship at Future Advisory Research some months ahead of schedule.”