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,” Ju
lian 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.”
The prospect made me shiver. Ghosts, imps, some adolescent mid-manifestation on astral walkabout . . . none of the possibilities were good.
There was only one place we could go without attracting attention from my watchdog. I’d been avoiding it since I got on the Metro that disastrous morning, but I had a justification for being there. And if we played our cards right, we could buy ourselves some time in the bunker.
FAR’s office building looked different as Julian and I approached. Nothing had changed; the windows were as clean and bright as ever, the ground floor lobby dominated by the same piece of bland public sculpture as before, a curving, abstract piece. The elevator smelled the same, faintly redolent of the pine-scented cleaning fluid the janitors mopped it with every night. Mariko was behind her desk as usual.
It wasn’t the place that had changed. It was me.
Mariko was on her feet before I even reached for the door handle, coming around her desk so fast she caught her thigh against the corner. I winced; that would leave a bruise. She didn’t seem to care. “Kim! Oh my goodness, we weren’t sure if we would ever see you again!”
“Hi, Mariko,” I said, managing a decent excuse for a smile. “I’m, um. Not really back yet. I need to talk to Adam about that, and I figured, I should at least come by and say hello.”
“Oh, of course!” She leaned over her desk and hit a button, which would turn on a discreet light in the various rooms. That way anybody in the middle of a divination or other piece of magical work wouldn’t have their work disturbed.
But people must have been in between tasks, because it was only a few seconds before doors started opening, heads popping out. Within moments I was surrounded, Julian retreating to a quiet spot in the corner. Most of the people here had seen him at one point or another, and a lot of them had been introduced, but I was the one being welcomed home.
Home. My throat closed up without warning, tears pricking my eyes. I hadn’t expected this kind of warmth and support, and it was shaking my composure. Not yet. Not yet.
Then Latonya stepped out of the way and Adam rolled his chair forward. “Kim,” he said, holding out his hand. Surprised, I took it in my own; he held on longer than mere politeness required. His grip was strong and warm, and a clear signal that whatever had happened, I still had a place here. “Gods, it’s good to see you. There’s been a lot of stuff on the news lately, reports about wilders—about that whole arrangement. I never realized how serious your situation was.”
I needed to talk to the reporters, keep the momentum going. It might do some good, if I leveraged the attention. “What kinds of things are they saying?”
“This deep shield business,” Adam said. “There’s an investigative reporter—”
I was supposed to be here to talk about the rest of my internship, the plans for me to go into training once the shield was down, which would keep me too busy to work at FAR for a while. It was a necessary bit of practicality, and made a good pretext for me to pay a visit to FAR, with Julian to keep me company. The next part was supposed to happen after that.
But my breath caught in my throat, my gut twisting in that too-familiar way, and I realized I would never have a better excuse than now.
A small sound escaped me, a sound I would have normally tried to suppress. It was a little gasp, cut off. Adam stopped, brows knitting in concern. “Kim?”
I waved one hand, pressing the other against my stomach. “I’m sorry. It’s just—” In my peripheral vision, I saw Julian rise from his chair. He couldn’t nudge me, not without anybody noticing, but he didn’t have to.
All I had to do was think about the shield. Not in a cold, rational way, trying to think of a method for cutting it out; not in hot anger, visualizing it as an enemy I could kill. An inexorable weight, pressing down on me, crushing the life from my spirit. Tears were spilling from my eyes. Every breath was a gasp, little sips of air that couldn’t fill my lungs. There were arms around me, a hand pressing gently on the small of my back, guiding my stumbling feet. I knew without asking that it was Julian. I didn’t lift my head to see where we were going; I just let him lead me, and then a door closed behind us and he said, “Kim. Can you pull yourself together?”
When I dashed the tears away and looked around, I found we were right where we had planned: in the heavily-warded bunker at the center of FAR’s offices.
I’d been in here last month, when Adam sent me to finish the fairy dust divination. It was a good place to take an emotionally fragile wilder — especially if the people there didn’t know what exactly the deep shield did and did not do — and it would keep us safe while Julian “comforted” me after my staged breakdown.
How long we would have was anybody’s guess. Julian had convinced Adam to leave us alone, but sooner or later somebody would knock on the door and ask if I was okay.
My body was still shuddering. The problem with staging a breakdown was, it had become entirely real. “Help me,” I said through my teeth.
Julian knew what I meant. “Are you sure?” At my nod, he went to work doing exactly what I had cursed at him not to do just a few days before. I couldn’t feel the empathic contact, but my distress vanished as if it had never been, leaving me with nothing but burning eyes and an accelerated heart rate to tell me I had ever been crying.
I sat down on the floor and opened my bag. This room was like the ritual spaces at Welton, an empty box with a copper ring in the floor. No cabinets of supplies or anything else, because the people who worked here brought their own. I imagined their supplies generally didn’t include coils of rope, nor plastic bags of illegal drugs.
Julian was presumably busy dismantling my outer shields — both the ones he placed on me after the surgery, and the ones that were part of the deep shield itself. While he did that, I tied my feet together and prepared the dust. I felt like a coke fiend, pouring it onto a pocket mirror and scraping it into a neat line for easy inhalation.
Then Julian was kneeling, using more of the rope to bind my arms to my sides. We didn’t know if I was going to thrash around, but figured it was better to be safe than sorry. And if we got caught mid-effort, me being trussed up like a hog wasn’t going to make it look any worse.
He didn’t ask if I was ready. We were long past that point. Instead he held up the mirror and a short length of straw. I took one deep breath to steady myself, let it out—and then inhaled the powder.
~
Julian was ready to catch Kim if she fell backward. She’d described the feeling of the drug to him before, even shared the memory with him; that kind of burning pain could make her convulse. But she only coughed briefly, swallowed, and then looked up at him.
“I don’t feel anything,” she said.
They’d administered it correctly. Both times Kim got hit with the dust, she had inhaled it. But that only held true if what Neeya had given them was indeed the same drug. Julian had never seen the stuff before, and Kim never had a chance to study it. They’d trusted that what Neeya had stolen had been the real thing, not a decoy or a different chemical.
Kim said, “It acted fast before. Pretty much instantaneously. I don’t think it’s doing anything.” Her voice was tight with worry.
All the breath left Julian in a rush. “Don’t worry. It is.”
He could feel it when he reached out, flowering through her like a firework. Gods above, Julian thought in awe, watching the effect spread and build. I hope we didn’t give her too much. It was a quiescent fire, a paradox: enormous power, energy for the taking, and yet just lying there inert. He’d been prepared for her gifts to spin out of control, but there was no chance of that. They couldn’t act without Kim’s direction, and she had no ability to stir them even to the slightest degree.
&n
bsp; Absurdly, he found himself laughing. “You’re glowing.”
Kim looked down at herself, but of course she couldn’t see it. Then she shook her head and shifted in his hands. “Lay me down. Let’s do this, before we lose our chance.”
She was right. Julian lowered her to the floor, then settled himself cross-legged alongside. The dust was doing as he had hoped, opening up her psychic senses as far as they could possibly go, and then further still. If they hadn’t been in a shielded space, every passing thought and feeling would have flooded in on her, with nothing but her own will to stand against them. Julian’s own shields were locked as tight as they could go, so that he wouldn’t inadvertently push his fear onto her. It was horrifying to see her so vulnerable, bound hand and foot and open to the world.
He laid the fingertips of his right hand on her head and his left hand on her pubic bone. Her chakras were blazing points of light beneath his touch, forming a pathway for him to follow. From the seventh down to the first, and then Julian was in freefall, diving into her spirit.
An inferno blazed around him, fire without heat. What could he do, if that power were his? The thought was exhilarating. No wonder people wanted this drug: with it, Julian might even be the equal of a sidhe.
But all of Kim’s current power wouldn’t help him with the shield. That work was done by ordinary bloods, people far less powerful in raw terms than any wilder. And it would be an unconscionable theft, a betrayal of Kim’s trust. Julian ignored the temptation and focused on finding his way downward, through the impossibly intricate web of thoughts and memories, feelings and sensations, all the endless complexity of a human spirit.
Somewhere in that mass, there was a wall, and he was going to tear it down.
And when he did . . .
He’d put up a memory block to stop himself from even thinking about it around Kim, lest he betray himself by some word or hesitation. It was dangerous to be this deeply embedded in someone’s spirit, even with all the defenses he could muster. Right now, of course, he was completely safe; the deep shield protected him, by making it impossible for Kim to take any action against him. But if he succeeded in his aim, then he would still be in the abyss when her gifts came flooding back to her, amplified beyond her control by the dust.