She was setting me up to look completely incompetent. Why? I tried not to fume as I got it wrong a second time, and then a third. Before I could try a fourth time, Grayson cut me off with an impatient slash of her hand. “Let me in. I’ll show you.”
Hoping I would get some answers now, I lowered my outermost shields and let her touch my mind more directly.
I felt Grayson spin up a telepathic shield as she did so, blocking out anybody who might try to eavesdrop on us. Okay, so this was a setup for us to talk privately. What was she going to say that needed such precautions?
Catch, Grayson said, and two pieces of knowledge slid into my mind.
They came in at a deeper level than conversational telepathy; it took me a moment to even figure out what I knew now that I hadn’t known before. Two magical procedures, both of them tiny things, but remarkably complex for their size.
The first is for Julian’s shield, Grayson said. The second is for yours.
Then she was gone from my mind and saying out loud, “Do you understand now? Good. Then try again.”
I nodded mechanically, keeping up the pretense while the rest of me reeled. She’d given me the keys for our shields. Not the ones to activate them; we had those already.
She’d given me the ones to deactivate them.
It was a good thing I’d paid so much attention while screwing up the banishment net, or I would have botched it for real this time. As it was, my execution was hardly a thing of elegance. “Practice that,” Grayson said, and went to check on Julian.
Scribbling notes gave me cover to regain my composure and think through what had just happened. My own key was useless to me; deactivating the shield required psychic gifts, and I didn’t have any when I was gutted. But I could share it with other people, making it possible for them to free me. And with Julian’s key, I could free him.
I cast a sidelong glance at Julian. Grayson didn’t seem to be criticizing his work, or coming up with any pretense to form a deeper contact with him. Then again, Julian was better at magically multi-tasking then I was. I studied his posture, the movements of his hands. He hadn’t been visibly tense before, but there was a looseness in his body now, an energy that hadn’t been there before. Grayson had shared the keys with him, too.
Telling us the shield couldn’t be removed had been a breach of confidentiality, but one the powers that be might forgive, if they knew Grayson had been trying to stop Julian from killing me. This . . . was straight-up felony.
Was Grayson trying to start a revolution?
I couldn’t spare the time or attention to think about it much. Julian was here mostly for evaluation, and to learn the few skills he needed that hadn’t been taught at the Center. I, on the other hand, was getting the rocket-powered crash course. An active Guardian either had to be a wilder—a proper wilder, one brought up through the Center’s educational system—or else a Ps.D. I had two and a half years of an undergraduate degree to my name. I’d known since the beginning that Julian knew orders of magnitude more about magic than I did, but one day in the basement with him and Grayson was enough to drive it home in a whole new way.
This is impossible, I thought, keeping the thought carefully to myself. How long would it take me to catch up? Even with one-on-one tutoring from Grayson and no free time, I couldn’t possibly do it in less than, what, two years? Maybe a year and a half, if I drove myself into the ground. But that was probably optimistic.
Julian was in Guardian pre-training. I was in Guardian remedial pre-school.
The thought didn’t make me angry, just bewildered, and maybe a little desperate. Nobody was going to hand me a badge and throw me out into the field next week—at least, I didn’t think so. In which case, why had Grayson looped me in for this? It couldn’t be just an excuse to hand me the shield keys.
That, at least, was a question I could ask her.
I waited until the end of the day, which might have been a mistake. Apart from a short lunch break and brief moments of breathing room while she worked with Julian, I’d been at it for hours, and my brain was turning to gumbo. But I didn’t want to go home without an answer.
“Professor,” I said, then wondered if I should be calling her “Guardian” now that she was active again. Whatever. Worry about protocol later. “I know I was supposed to be sent for training, to make up the difference between what a normal wilder is expected to know and what I’ve been taught. But I didn’t think this was what they had in mind.”
“It wasn’t,” Grayson said, sheathing her athame and placing it in a silk-lined case. “I intervened.”
“Why?”
She snapped the clasps of her leather satchel together and slung it over one shoulder. “Because what they had in mind would have been a waste of your time. The ordinary course of education for a wilder lasts ten years or so. The first four years of the curriculum are unnecessary for you, as are portions of the rest. But at a conservative estimate, training you in the remainder would have taken at least three years—and at the end of it, you would still not have been fully prepared for Guardianship.” She raised her eyebrows at me. They hadn’t been bleached by the accident that took the color from the rest of her hair. “I presume you still wish to be a Guardian?”
“Yes, of course.” I floundered for words. Julian was standing off to one side, feet apart, hands clasped loosely behind his back. I wanted him to jump in, and knew that was stupid; this was my conversation, not his. “I just . . . I don’t get why you think this is worth your time. There’s fairy dust on the streets, riots in Chicago—so many other problems you could be working on. Why did you decide this was the one to tackle?”
I wasn’t asking out of low self-esteem, and Grayson, to her credit, didn’t read it that way. “Because it should have started months ago. The Division for Special Psychic Affairs shouldn’t have waited on the determination of your legal status; they ought to have offered you training the moment you left Welton. Would you have refused?”
The answer to that wasn’t as easy as it might have been. The thing I wanted, offered by the people I was trying to keep away from? I would have begun examining the whole thing for concealed hooks before they were done talking.
But assuming the offer was genuine . . .
I would have gone for it so fast I’d leave smoke in my wake.
“But they didn’t trust you,” Grayson said. “Partly because you had been Unseelie, but more because you didn’t—don’t—fit into the structure they’re accustomed to. And so they have squandered a valuable resource: someone with more intimate knowledge of the sidhe than any human being on this plane of existence. And I include Julian in that assessment.”
Hearing Grayson describe me that way was disorienting. She made me sound important. Which, rationally, I knew was true: I was the first person ever to be deliberately uplifted to wilder status, the first person we knew of to be bound to one of the Courts of the sidhe, one of the few people to have visited the Otherworld since it separated from our own realm millennia ago. But I’d assumed my importance was pretty much in the past tense. She was talking about me as if she expected me to do great things going forward, too.
I cast a quick glance at Julian. His face was impassive, but when he caught me looking at him, he offered an empathic hand. Taking it, I realized that he felt the same way Grayson did, and irritated to boot. Okay, so we were a pair of twenty-something wilders, one of us not even half-trained. I’d assumed that meant we had no role to play in what happened next. He hadn’t.
It hardly came as a surprise to know the last few months had been frustrating for him, with no clear path for him to follow. I’d been so focused on my legal problems, though, that I hadn’t realized just how deep it ran.
And even now, thinking about my future, I’d been focused on wilders and the shield. Not on the sidhe. “Is there something you expect me to do, that you’re trying to prepare me for? Something specific?”
Grayson shrugged. “Not especially. But I consider equipping yo
u for every possibility to be a high priority.”
Handing us the keys to our shields went well beyond mere preparation; it was provocation. I could hardly accuse her of lying, though. “It’s going to take a while,” I said dryly.
Her answering smile showed teeth. “I trust you’ll learn as fast as you can.”
~
Julian would have preferred to hold off on discussing anything until they were safely behind the warded walls of the apartment, just for the sake of caution. But he was honest enough to admit he would have been chewing on his own tongue to stay quiet for that long, and when Kim pinged his mind on the train home, he didn’t hesitate to respond.
Holy crap, she said. I did not expect Grayson to do that.
Mind-to-mind, it was clear she meant the shield keys, with an undercurrent of surprise about Grayson’s more generalized criticism of how the DSPA had treated her. Julian’s response was a wordless transmission of his own mixed reaction. He couldn’t truly say he’d expected it . . . but at the same time, he wasn’t entirely surprised. Grayson had been half on their side for a while now.
Was she fully on their side now? How far could he push her?
He’d been analyzing the keys when Kim made telepathic contact. They were fascinating things—not at all what he’d imagined, which was part of why he’d persistently failed at guessing their structure. They bore no resemblance to the trigger keys; that much came as no shock. If the two had been linked, then either the government wouldn’t have been in the habit of handing every wilder their own trigger, or somebody would have reverse-engineered the release by now. It didn’t feel like a randomized structure, though. There was an underlying logic to it, he felt sure. He just had to figure out what it was.
Once he had that, he might have the key to everything.
I can feel you thinking, Kim said. But I can’t quite see your thoughts.
The habit of caution made him hesitate. After all, what he had in mind could well get him thrown in prison. The same was true of his attempt to remove the shield from Kim, though, and she hadn’t flinched from volunteering for that.
He opened the connection between them and ran through his reasoning so far. Kim’s response came as the mental equivalent of a breathless laugh. Gods. I can’t follow that, even when I’m in your mind. He felt her trying to unpack it. Leaving aside the technical aspects for now . . . gods. You want to unlock everybody’s shield.
The train slowed into Farragut West. A few people left, but more people packed on. The guy nearest Julian gripped the overhead bar and set his feet, resisting the push to move toward the pair of wilders in the end of the car. Julian and Kim were against the door already, leaving space between themselves and the legs of the people sitting to either side, using telekinesis to brace themselves when the train lurched into motion once again. The iron of the railway burned against Julian’s senses, but his mental push held.
It doesn’t get rid of the problem, he said once the floor steadied. But if we can’t get rid of it, then this is the next best thing. Break the locks on the jail.
Kim was silent, not just refraining from sending any reply, but momentarily masking her thoughts from his sight. Then she said, Liesel and I were talking about the possibility of an alternative. If we had one, something truly viable . . . then we could make a push to have that be the new standard, and just stop using this bloody thing entirely. That would mean revising SUPRA, though—and doing that would mean either walking away from the Cairo Accords, or getting the signatory countries to amend them.
She had such faith in the legislative process, in formal solutions to problems. Even after the fight over her own status—a fight that had essentially been dropped when it became too inconvenient to everyone else—she still believed in changing the rules to be more fair.
Julian kept that thought from her, as he kept his own visceral reaction. Right now, the world was in no mood to experiment with any more change than it already had. A generation from now, two generations, three . . . maybe then. But not yet. And he wasn’t willing to wait.
He did share the more temperate version. How much of a relief is it to you, knowing I can let you out of the shield? Shouldn’t Neeya have that relief? Guan? All the others?
Of course, she said without hesitation. But you aren’t thinking about getting the DSPA to share the keys. You’re trying to hack them on your own. How do you think they’ll react, if they find out?
Lying was much more difficult in telepathy, and Julian didn’t even try. He made no effort to pretend he thought the Division wouldn’t find out. Even if every wilder kept their mouth shut—and he doubted all of them had the restraint for that—the cat would be out of the bag the first time someone escaped the shield without being released through normal channels. And when that happened—I don’t expect the reaction to be good. Probably they’ll lock down as many of us as they can, while they figure out the problem. We can’t free each other if we’re all gutted together. He could feel Kim’s alarm, and continued before she could interrupt. But think about Grayson. She won’t let that pass, and she isn’t the only one. There are people who will see it as unjust. And that will go farther toward making our point than any amount of begging at the feet of Congress.
He let too much slip. Kim had been gazing straight ahead, at the backs of the passengers turned steadfastly away from them; now her head whipped around to face him.
Julian expected her to be angry at him — and she was, a little. But not as much as he had expected. I think somebody got to Ramos, she admitted. I doubt they told her outright that the shield is lethal, but they must have done something like that. I believe what Grayson said, that they don’t leave this thing on us just because it makes a useful leash. But I also believe they like having the leash. And they’re going to react very badly if we try to take it away.
She went silent again, closing her mind off from him to the point where he almost thought the conversation was over. Then she reached out again, and he restored the connection. How long do you think it will take you to hack the release? To the point where you could figure out the key to somebody else’s shield.
I have no idea, Julian admitted. If you’d asked me a week ago, I would have told you that I’d do it in a day, with two actual keys to use as examples. Whoever designed this was a genius, though. It’s more complicated than I expected. He doubted the whole thing was the work of Medina Perez. Shielding hadn’t been nearly that sophisticated back in her day. They’d improved on her design, elaborated it, turned it into something more than a mere protective measure for children.
A week, then? A month? Longer?
He bowed his head, looking at his boots neatly aligned with the ribbed flooring of the car. I really don’t know. It could be a week. It could be a year. Right now, it depends on how clever I am. It would probably go faster if I shared what we have with certain other people, but—
But that would increase the risk of you being caught before you get anywhere, Kim finished. What about finding an alternative to the shield? Do you think you could make a difference with what Robert and Liesel are doing, if you focused on it?
Focused on that, rather than on the deep shield . . .
It was something he should have thought about years ago — but he’d always assumed the shield could be taken out the same way it was put in. Because of that, he’d been willing to accept to accept the necessity for it in the first place. But that wasn’t true anymore.
Julian blew out a slow breath, thinking. He didn’t have an answer before the train reached Rosslyn, and not much of one after they got off. “You realize there’s no simple answer to that,” he said as they went up the stairs.
“I know. It’s like saying, ‘Do you think you could invent cold fusion?’ I guess what I’m asking, at least to start with, is whether you think an alternative is even possible.”
That, at least, he could answer without hesitation. “Yes. I don’t know what it would be, and I can’t even promise it would be better t
han what we have now. But we know so much that we didn’t know even a year ago, and oceans more than we knew back in Medina Perez’s day. And what’s more, I think that’s something we can ask for help with.”
Because they had switched to speaking out loud, her reply was circumspect. “We can, can’t we? I mean, I won’t pretend they’ll like it. But at least it’s a socially acceptable thing for us to do. Only—” She bit her lip, shaking her head. “I don’t want to divide your attention.”
“Then don’t,” he said. “This is more your kind of thing anyway.”
Her golden eyes widened. “Huh? I don’t think I can divine my way to an answer, Julian. And my knowledge of CM is hopelessly scattershot right now. If Robert hasn’t come up with the solution already, I don’t stand a snowflake’s chance in a pyrokinesis class.”
They were in public, so he didn’t drape his arm over her shoulders the way he wanted to. He did smile, though, and gave it an empathic boost. “I didn’t mean you should invent the alternative yourself. You can be a spokeswoman, and a rallying point. For the Fiain and the public both.”
He could sense her doubt just in the tension of her body. “You really think the Fiain would welcome me in that role?”
“Not all of them,” he admitted. “But not everybody would welcome me, either. We aren’t a monolith, Kim, and gods know we aren’t much good at building alliances with the world outside our own borders. The most brilliant solution in the world won’t help if we can’t persuade the Division to start using it.”
She wasn’t used to the protocols of wilder society, which said contact was a thing done out of public sight. Kim slid one arm around his waist, matching her step to his. Julian gave in, returning the embrace, and they walked in step the rest of the way home.
Chapter Twelve
I spent a couple of days thinking about what Julian and I had discussed. Not the technical side—well, mostly not—but the more immediate question of how to go about it. I came up with a few sensible approaches. Then, after consulting with Julian, Toby, and Guan, I went another route entirely.