Chains and Memory

  “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, a
nd 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.”

  I nodded warily, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  He didn’t make me wait long. “While you were in Georgia, you began seeing a therapist, did you not?”

  Lying would hardly make anything better. “Yes, I did. On the advice of both of my parents, as well as the agents who questioned me after I left Welton. I’d been kidnapped by the Unseelie; they rewrote my genetic code, for gods’ sakes. I attacked my own boyfriend and tried to murder him. It’s enough to give anybody PTSD.”

  “Since moving to this city, have you resumed therapy?”

  “No,” I said, through my teeth. “I haven’t found a therapist I like yet.”

  I heard Stutler draw in a deep breath. All my attention had been on Kutty; when I turned my head, I found Stutler’s expression had settled into grave lines. “Kim, we found no traces of sidhe presence at the station last night.”

  My jaw sagged. “No traces? But that many glamours—they would have left some kind of residue behind. Unless the sidhe sat around for half an hour picking every bit of it apart, and they’re not going to do that when—shit.” I growled in inarticulate frustration. “Iron. The rails are steel, and I’m betting half that station is, too. It’s old construction. The traces would have dissolved all on their own, because of the iron.”

  “It’s possible,” Stutler said, his voice carefully neutral.

  He didn’t believe me. A steady flow of profanity started up in the back corners of my mind. Would I believe me, in his position? Which was more likely: that the Unseelie violated their agreement and came in force to an area filled with iron, where they employed a series of linked glamours to provoke me into dangerous behavior, and that the traces of their handiwork were then erased before the agents could get there . . . or that a young woman with documented PTSD heard someone coming up the stairs, panicked, and lashed out?

  I realized, with sudden cold clarity, that I was a fucking idiot for having gotten in the car with Stutler today. For having come here like a trusting little lamb, all by myself.

  My voice shaking, I said, “I’d like to call my lawyer.”

  Chapter Three

  I didn’t make it back to FAR that afternoon.

  My lawyer came, and things got very unpleasant for a while. Kutty dragged out every single mistake I’d made since December—even things I didn’t remember—and piled up together, they made me look like a menace to society. I asked at one point whether I was being accused of a crime, and Stutler told me that no, the guy at McPherson Square had declined to press charges. The implication, of course, being that if he’d chosen differently, I’d be in even deeper shit than I was already.

  I had thought of Stutler as my friend in SIF. I didn’t anymore.

  My lawyer was a guy named Thomas Lotze. Unlike half the people I dealt with these days, he wasn’t a friend of my mother’s; he was the best lawyer she could hire. He gave me a piece of his mind for not having called him before going with Stutler, which I submitted to without protest. He was right, after all.

  It dragged on forever, until I was more than half afraid I wouldn’t escape. There was no crime, though, and holding me in the short term wouldn’t accomplish anything for anybody, so they finally let me go. By the time they did, it was well and truly dark out, and I was going to be late for my first training session with Guan.

  At least I’d had the sense not to say anything about that to the SIF guys, or even to Lotze.

  When I was alone at last, I dug out my port and called Julian. He answered after one ring, and listened silently as I told him what had happened.

  He stayed silent for a while even after I was done. My fingers curled around the edge of my port. Then, when I was on the verge of speaking again, he said, “It makes you wonder how many of the other problems were coincidence.”

  My fingers tightened around my port. The woman with the Unseelie contact lenses—it hadn’t just been the flash of gold that set me off. I’d been uneasy before then, my psychic senses on edge, because I kept having the feeling that somebody was following me. I hadn’t said anything about that at the time, or even today. I couldn’t tell whether that was a good decision or not. “You think they’ve been setting me up this whole time. Not just with the thing last night, but before then.”

  “Maybe,” Julian said.

  I couldn’t say this to Stutler. It would sound like a conspiracy theory, the product of an unhinged mind. I didn’t even think Lotze could do anything with it. Not without proof, and where was I going to get that?

  Every bad or weird thing that had happened to me since I came to D.C. took on a different cast in my mind. How many of them were happenstance, and how many were a plot to get me shielded?

  Despite my best efforts, my voice wavered as I spoke again. “I don’t know if I should come tonight. What you said after lunch—I don’t want them thinking I need training.” That I needed help controlling myself.

  “You’re just visiting the house of some wilders,” Julian said without hesitation. “There’s no reason they should find that suspicious.”

  “Unless somebody tells them what I’m doing there.”

  “Kim.” He said my name quietly but firmly. It steadied me. “No one will tell them. There isn’t a single person among the Fiain who wants to see you gutted.”

  Not even Neeya. She didn’t like me, but it was a long way from not liking to wanting to see me placed under the deep shield. Did they all hate it as much as Julian did? Were they really all rooting for me to go free?

  Julian thought so. I had to trust him.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said.

  ~

  I was hyper-alert on the Metro ride out to Eastern Market—even more so than usual. If the Unseelie really had been messing with me all this time, then I couldn’t take anything for granted. Was the drunk woman singing off-key at the other end of my car put there to annoy me, setting me up for some kind of confrontation? I didn’t know, but I switched cars at the next station to get away from her.

  I can’t live like this, I thought as I neared my stop. It really will send me insane.

  Maybe that was what the Unseelie wanted.

  It was a relief when I got to my destination. The townhouse was a small one in a quiet neighborhood, the sort of place somebody could afford on a federal paycheck as long as they had a roommate. Guan had suggested this as a good practice site; it was the home of two wilders, both of them Guardians. Marcus was at work that evening, but Toby opened the door a half-second after my knock.

  Seeing him made me realize how much my perception of wilders had changed. In the past I’d noted their appearances—skin color, eye color, that sort of thing—but their defining feature had always been their numinous quality, brought on by their high Krauss ratings. Now that
was invisible to me, and other things came through. Toby looked hapa, like maybe one of his birth parents had been white, the other one Asian. Culturally, of course, he was still Fiain. For the first time, though, I found myself thinking about the fact that they came from somewhere. They had human ancestors, not just sidhe ones.

  Those thoughts made me slow off the conversational mark. He stepped in to fill the gap. “You’re Kim,” he said. “Welcome.” Not you must be Kim. No deduction necessary, not with my gold eyes advertising my identity. Contact lenses could only approximate that look.

  “Thank you for letting us use your house,” I said, stepping over the threshold. “I’m grateful for the place to practice . . . and I have to admit, I’m glad to meet other wilders.”

  He merely nodded. I wondered how he had interpreted “other”—did he think I was counting myself as one? Or that I meant wilders other than Julian? I wasn’t sure myself which way I’d meant it.

  A mrrrrp from the living room drew my attention. A moment later a calico cat put her head around the corner. Seeing me, she headed my way with an odd little galloping gait, and commenced butting her head into my ankles with a piteous air, as if she would die should someone not pick her up and cuddle her.

  “Kim, meet Hitomi,” Toby said with a grin. “Don’t believe her when she pretends to be helpless. She can jump onto the dining room table without any trouble.”

  When I bent to pet her, I saw what he meant. One of Hitomi’s hind legs had been amputated; that was why her gait was so odd. “What happened?”

  “Dog bite. She’s a rescue cat; we took her in when the shelter would have put her down.”

  Either Hitomi was entirely acclimated to her owners, or cats didn’t mind a wilder’s touch. She leaned into my hand, deftly catching her balance when I let up from scritching her cheek. I could see why they’d adopted her; she had the sweetest face I’d ever seen on a cat, and she used it shamelessly.

  Pets: another entry on the endless list of Things I Never Associated With Wilders. But of course they had lives beyond their duties. Through the doorway I could see the living room was lined with books, a large screen stuffed in one corner. I wondered if Toby and Marcus were a couple, or just roommates. Julian hadn’t said, and I wasn’t about to ask—not on a first visit, anyway.