Messages had piled up on my port while I was ignoring the world, though they trailed off as none of them got replies. I went through them, deleted most, listened to a few, and finally made a phone call.
“Artemis Chang,” a crisp voice said on the other end of the line.
“Ms. Chang? It’s Kimberly Argant-Dubois. Fiain,” I added belatedly, remembering the legal change. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your call before now. Are you still interested in doing an interview?”
~
“Your declaration got a great deal of attention,” Artemis Chang said. “Why the long silence afterward?”
She was the epitome of perfectly-groomed fashion, sitting across from me in a minimalist chair, her asymmetrical jacket hanging at an attractive angle. Even her haircut made me feel inadequate, every strand was clipped to such a precise standard. Her show’s stylists had worked me over before putting me in front of the camera, but I wanted to look like myself, inadequate fashion and all. So I was in the business clothes I wore to FAR, but had my hair pulled back in a simple ponytail, and relatively little makeup.
I tried to focus on her and ignore the camera, the way she’d instructed me to do. “For the same reason I made the declaration to begin with—at least, that’s part of it. The deep shield is very traumatic. I’m sure many of your viewers have been shielded at one point or another during their lives, but this thing just isn’t the same. In the days after I left the hospital, I was in no state to talk to anybody.” I allowed myself a small, self-deprecating grin. “To be honest, I probably would have answered your questions with wall-to-wall profanity.”
Chang didn’t laugh. This wasn’t that kind of interview, where we chatted like old friends and left everybody feeling mildly entertained. We’d agreed that I would crack the occasional joke—it would help humanize me for the people who couldn’t see past my golden eyes—but she would keep the tone serious. “When you say ‘traumatic’ . . . can you describe that?”
I looked her straight in the eye. To her credit, she didn’t flinch. “Imagine,” I said, “that someone has reached inside you and torn everything out. You’re a hollow shell, somehow still walking around. It isn’t like being tied up. It’s like being paralyzed. Not only can’t you move, you can’t even feel that you have a body to move with.”
She nodded soberly. “Is it like this for all wilders, or only for you? Does having the deep shield installed after you’re an adult change the effect?”
“Yes and no. When they put the shield on me, I knew what I was missing. The other wilders grow up with that feeling; they don’t know what it means until they’re old enough to understand the explanation. For them, it’s more normal.” I paused just long enough to give my next words effect. “But that kind of suffering should never be normal.”
“And so you’ve vowed to get rid of the shield,” Chang said.
“It’s more than just that,” I said. This was the important part; this was why I’d decided to see if any of the interviewers who had contacted me were still interested. I wanted to spread this idea as far as I possibly could, so that even if I got shut down, somebody else might run with it. I just hoped my silence hadn’t lasted long enough that everybody forgot about me. “The shield was developed as a means of protecting wilder children, giving them a chance to grow up and then learn control of their gifts. The woman who developed it, Araceli Medina Perez, was a brilliant doctor—we owe her so much. But we’ve come a long way since then. I think it’s time we developed a replacement for the shield.
“I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t know how to do that. I’m hoping other people will put their minds to the task. We have a lot of brilliant psychics these days, not only here in the U.S. but throughout the world. We even have the sidhe. I don’t believe there’s only one solution to this problem, and we’ve already found it. I want to find a new one.”
Chang nodded thoughtfully. It was a pose, but a convincing one; there was a reason she was one of the most highly-regarded interview journalists out there. “What about those who say the shield serves another purpose? One that might not be replicated by your new solution?”
“What purpose is that?” I asked, letting my voice harden. “To keep wilders in line? We’re talking about the people who invented the concept of the Guardian. Who still, even now, make up nearly a fifth of the Guardian Corps. Ninety percent of them volunteer for that duty. They willingly put their lives on the line to protect us. And we’re afraid they’re going to become the bad guys?”
“You have to admit that their gifts—your gifts—are formidable.” Images of the Crystal City station would be inserted here after we were done filming, I was sure, reminding everybody just what I was capable of. “It’s the loaded weapon argument: if you’re carrying a gun around in your head all the time, isn’t it in the interests of public safety to see to it that gun is regulated?”
“Last time I checked, we wait to imprison people until after they commit a crime.”
“You consider the deep shield to be imprisonment?”
It was easier to talk about the thing now that it had been deactivated, but it still made me tense up. I tried to let that show. “It’s worse than imprisonment. It’s cruel and unusual punishment, and it’s a violation of civil rights.”
Chang spread her elegantly manicured hands. “A judicial review at the turn of the century concluded that it was acceptable to abridge the rights of wilders in that fashion so long as there was a compelling public interest to justify it.”
She’d done her homework . . . but I’d done more. “That has never been brought before the Supreme Court. And the ‘compelling public interest’ is safety—the safety of everyone, wilders included. If we can ensure that safety by other, less problematic means, then we should.”
The heat of the lights was beginning to get to me. I wanted to cool myself off, but that was subtle pyrokinesis, of a sort I still hadn’t mastered. If I tried, I was liable to do something that totally distracted Chang, like dropping the whole set to freezing. I had to trust that one of her people would call a pause if I started to sweat visibly.
Which seemed pretty likely, given Chang’s next question. “In light of everything you’ve described, why are we only hearing about this now? Why haven’t any wilders brought the situation to public notice before, or filed a lawsuit against the state?”
In other words, who the hell are you to complain, when they haven’t?
The easy answer was “because of the geas.” But I couldn’t say that. It wasn’t public knowledge that the Seelie had laid a duty on the half-breeds all those ages ago, and even my thirst for transparency didn’t go that far. There were too many ways it could backfire—starting with giving people the idea that the only reason they could trust wilders was because the sidhe had compelled them to be trustworthy. If we ever got rid of that binding, I didn’t want the next step to be a pogrom against the Fiain.
Instead I shrugged, trying to look wry. “Maybe I’m just not as good a person as the rest of them. The ones I’ve met are amazingly generous; they’d rather devote their lives to helping other people, and never mind their own happiness. But I’ll tell you this: I haven’t found a single one who likes the shield. If we had a viable alternative, I think they’d take it. I know for certain that some of them would. And really, is there any good reason not to at least look into it?”
“That’s what you intend to do?”
“With help, if I can get it. This is my call to the world, and I hope it’s one others can rally behind.” Now, contrary to Chang’s advice, I turned and faced the camera directly. “Let’s find a solution—together. I’d like to put together a research group, and a foundation to raise money for the work. It’s going to take a while to set those things up, but we don’t have to wait; we can start looking for answers now.”
I wanted to go on with the rest of it, making it clear that my call was not just to the human population of the mortal world, but also to the sidhe of the Otherworld—
the Seelie half of them, anyway. When I’d talked it over with Julian, though, he’d convinced me that doing so would only rile up anti-sidhe sentiment, poisoning people against my cause. I hadn’t been able to restrain myself from slipping in one brief reference to them; hopefully that would be enough.
Because for all my optimistic words, I wasn’t sure we could solve this problem without them.
~
I expected to get some messages from people after the interview aired.
I didn’t expect a flood.
“Gods and sidhe,” I said to Julian, the old curse slipping out by force of habit. “I’m glad I set up a dedicated account ahead of time. I wish everybody would use it, like I asked — some of them are pinging my usual account.” I grimaced. “If that keeps up, I’m going to need to switch to an unlisted service.”
“Or move house,” he said, which made me go diving for my tarot cards. They said the odds of anyone showing up at my door were low—presuming I could trust a reading that close to my own life. I should ask somebody at FAR to check. Except, of course, there was no way I could afford their services.
I couldn’t even afford an assistant to filter the garbage from the new account, which was looking increasingly necessary. It seemed like every third person in the world had ideas for how to replace the shield; another third had foul words for me instead. Michele, the leader of the Palladian Circle, had taken on the task of wading through the muck, for which I owed her an enormous debt of gratitude. Robert had offered to help her by answering the trolls and the idiots, but I suspected that wouldn’t end well. Once upon a time, we’d called his sense of humor “unseelie.” I tried to avoid using that word these days, but it didn’t mean Robert had changed.
I also didn’t expect the response I got at—I found myself thinking of it as “work,” and had to stop and ponder my choice of word. FAR had been work, until Crystal City. I didn’t know if I would ever go back there. Certainly the paychecks had stopped, replaced by much smaller ones that were my training stipend. Which made the people at the Aegis Building—Guardians and other trainees alike—my co-workers.
Most of them ignored me. They already knew everything useful I might say; my reports on the sidhe had long since been disseminated through their ranks, and beyond that, I was just a trainee. The day after the interview, a couple of them stopped me in the halls to deliver pointed comments about my priorities being in the wrong place. It was clear they thought I was being selfish. But none of them were Fiain, and so I didn’t so much take their opinions with a grain of salt as toss them out entirely.
The Fiain in the Corps weren’t the only ones who supported me, though. When we started training with Grayson, Julian and I had eaten our lunches in the cafeteria with Inola, Neeya, and other wilders I knew from Toby and Marcus’ house. After the interview went live, I found myself at the center of a growing and ever-shifting crowd, only some of them wilders, discussing the theory and pragmatics of possible replacements.
It was an exhilarating experience. I couldn’t follow half of what flew past, and knew by the subliminal buzz that there were another dozen conversations being carried out via telepathy — less to keep people from eavesdropping, more to save the speakers from having to make themselves heard over the din. But we’d said more than once that we had knowledge and resources Medina Perez couldn’t have dreamed of . . . and now I saw just how true that was.
These people weren’t specialists. Whatever idea we eventually settled on, we would need the assistance of experts in the relevant fields, professors at places like Welton. Guardians were trained in quick response tactics, fixes that would last long enough for someone else to arrange a better solution. But that also meant they were used to thinking outside the box, applying unconventional methods to unexpected problems.
And best of all, they lived for challenges. Back when I was fifteen and first had the idea of becoming a Guardian, one of my mother’s co-workers had said something that stuck with me. Two kinds of people become Guardians: wilders and adrenaline junkies. My call to arms had awoken a hint of the latter response, giving them a chance to stretch their creativity to the limit. In fifteen minutes on the first day alone, I heard people suggest everything from fostering wilder children with the Seelie Court — that was Inola’s idea — to crafting sympathetically-bound poppets that would take the brunt of anything an infant wilder dished out.
I didn’t contribute very much to these discussions. How could I? They gathered around me, not because I was leading them, but because I’d blown the starting whistle for the race. My presence helped organize the cafeteria. People working on shield replacements sat near me, leaving the rest of the room for everybody else. We had every wilder in the place — bar Neeya, who always stayed nearby, but rarely spoke. She just kept watching me and Julian.
I ignored her as best I could, and focused my attention mostly on the ordinary bloods. Their behavior was startling, and kind of a relief. Guardians were more accustomed than most to working in close proximity to wilders. They still practiced the usual habits, avoiding gaze and touch, but if somebody bumped into one of the Fiain at the coffee machine, they didn’t drop their cup. What mattered in this crowd was your skill at the job, and your willingness to put your life on the line for it. Here, even more than among wilders alone, I felt like I could be accepted.
One refrain came up again and again. “You’ve got to assume the sidhe have this problem,” a woman named Marta said. “So how do they deal with it?”
The question of the millennium. “I’d like to ask them,” I said.
“You may get your chance.”
The voice was Grayson’s. She waved me back into my seat before I even realized I’d risen from it. I just barely swallowed the urge to say “Professor?” Instead I asked, “What do you mean?”
My answer came, not from her, but from the ceiling. The loudspeakers came to life, echoing through a room that fell silent in record time. “All Guardians and trainees to report to the Pearce auditorium immediately.”
In any other group I’d ever been a part of, there would have been an immediate clamor as people started speculating what was going on. I felt the buzz of telepathic conversations in the air, but every full Guardian instantly put down their food or drink and headed for the door, followed a half-beat later by the trainees. These were emergency personnel; when they were told to do something immediately, they took that as a literal order.
Julian and I exchanged glances, but neither of us spoke. We’d get our answers soon enough. Until then, we were just wasting breath.
The Corps chief was waiting in the auditorium: Radha Sarabhai, a woman I’d seen at a distance but never met. When the flow of people into the room stopped, she closed her eyes for a moment, probably scanning the building to make certain nobody vital was missing. Then she opened them and said, “The White House has just issued a public announcement. They will be meeting with representatives of the Seelie Court in three days. Divinatory forecasts predict two large marches on the National Mall that day, one pro-sidhe, the other anti. The probability of conflict is high, and so we’ve been instructed to mobilize all personnel for the event. That includes trainees.”
My heart skipped a beat. When she said “trainees” . . . did she only mean the ones going through the usual process, like Neeya? Or did that include Julian and me? Him I could see; he was mostly ready for it. Me, not so much—not to mention the sheer recognizability of my face.
Now was not the time to ask. Other people had more important questions. And it seemed Guardians had adopted the wilder method of telepathic queuing, which I’d seen a few times at Toby’s house, because Sarabhai nodded at a woman who’d made no gesture I could see. The woman asked, “Has anyone made estimates of trouble elsewhere in the city, while our forces are focused on the Mall?”
“Yes,” Sarabhai said. “The probability is lower, but we’re covering that eventuality regardless. Reinforcements will be temporarily seconded to us from neighboring regions.” r />
Someone near the front of the room asked about measures to keep the two groups from colliding. I was busy parsing another part of Sarabhai’s announcement.
She’d said the White House was meeting with the Seelie. Not the sidhe as a whole. Not the Unseelie.
Not yet, anyway. The two Courts had managed enough of a détente to appear together at the U.N. announcement, but it seemed it didn’t go any further than that. I had to assume the Unseelie might come later; it was too much to hope for that our government would treat them as entirely hostile. And Sarabhai, answering another question, specified that we were to protect any sidhe who might show up, regardless of Court. Half the room shifted uneasily when she said that, but she quelled us with a look. I saw her point, though I didn’t like it: expecting random people on the street to check eye color before they reacted was a bad idea. The Seelie had gotten their foot in the door first; I would count that as a victory.
Assuming their visit didn’t result in D.C. being burned to the ground, of course.
I’d be doing my part to prevent that, though. After Sarabhai designated a slate of senior Guardians as captains for the event, I sought out Grayson. She didn’t have that title, but she was the person I reported to here. “Am I on deck for this?” I asked.
“You’re a trainee, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “but—well, let’s be honest. Me on the streets is not exactly going to help defuse anything.”
Grayson smiled faintly. “You’ll be in street clothes, not a uniform. Trainees will be circulating in the crowds, in telepathic contact with their unit captain. Put on a pair of sunglasses, Kim—it’s time to do your duty.”
~
The last time Julian had seen this many Fiain in one place, he’d still been living at the Center.
They weren’t the only ones out patrolling the National Mall, of course. They were joined by SIF agents, Park Police, and the Secret Service, some of those forces making their presence overt with uniforms, others in plain clothes. But the Guardian Corps had sent all the wilders to the pro-sidhe march; anything else would have amounted to throwing a match on a pile of gasoline-soaked rags.