Toby offered me water, which I declined. Then we went down to the basement, where Julian was already at hard at work with Neeya. My eyes popped when I realized what they were doing.
Neeya lounged against the wall on one side of the room, with Julian at the far end. She had a book on the floor between her feet, and I thought at first that she’d been reading while Julian practiced something on his own. Then the book shot across the intervening space and landed in front of Julian, who was sitting cross-legged as if meditating. His face was set in a look of intense concentration, and I couldn’t figure out why. Moving a book telekinetically wasn’t exactly hard—
Then the book vanished, and reappeared between Neeya’s feet once more.
“Don’t let me take it,” Neeya said with a taunting smile.
Julian wasn’t just moving the book. He was trying to teleport it. Which was fine when you had a summoning circle to make it come to you . . . and insanely difficult when you did it with pure telekinesis.
“Neeya’s very good at that,” Guan said. “But I suggest we stay on this side of the room, out of Julian’s line of fire.”
With my attention on the other two, I hadn’t seen him sitting in the corner to my right, in one of a pair of battered armchairs. The basement was clearly outfitted as a practice room for Toby and Marcus; it had very little that could break or light the house on fire, but the open doors of a sturdy metal cabinet over by Julian showed various ritual items like candles, mirrors, and jars of powder.
I went to sit with Guan. “Do you want to start work on something in particular?” he asked.
He posed the question casually, but I heard a test in it. He was a teacher, after all. If he hadn’t already cooked up some lesson plans for me, I would catch in my teeth the book currently zipping across the room. He wanted to see what I went for first.
The truth was, I really didn’t know where I should start. The list of things I needed to learn was as long as my arm, and figuring out which one ought to go first was impossible.
But there was one thing I could tell Guan.
“I think somebody is trying to screw around with me,” I said in a low voice, so Neeya wouldn’t hear. Toby had gone back upstairs. “Probably the Unseelie, but I don’t know for sure. You know better than I do what I need to learn first, but as far as priorities go . . . I want to protect myself against them.”
“Combat magic?” Guan asked, his voice similarly soft. He was watching me closely.
I shook my head. “As much as I like the idea of taking those bastards’ heads off, no. Right now I need to act like a nice, responsible member of psychic society. I’ve been practicing shielding with Julian, but that’s passive; it only protects me from direct attacks. It doesn’t make them stop screwing with me in the first place.”
Guan had the full measure of wilder unreadability, but I thought the slight tightening around his eyes signaled satisfaction. I’d passed his test. He said, “Disruption spirals, then.”
A quick press of my lips kept the words I’ve seen those in the movies from leaving my mouth. “Okay.”
Before five minutes were up, I knew Guan was nothing like any teacher I’d had in my life, from my Yan Path tutor in childhood to Grayson last fall. For one thing, I was used to reading theory in textbooks before I moved on to actual practice. Maybe it was because Guan was doing this on the sly, ergo he didn’t have books on hand, but I got the impression he was used to teaching through lecture and example, not explanatory texts. I made a mental note to ask Julian later.
He also didn’t hold my hand on anything. Julian had called him “laid-back,” and in a way he was; he didn’t radiate focused intensity the way Grayson did. But all of my college professors, I realized, had been pitching their classes to the lowest common denominator. Which at Welton was pretty high—after all, it was the top psychic sciences university in the country—but still, the roster for any given class ranged from strong talents to people who were just barely muddling through, like me when I took Effect Limits.
Guan didn’t have to worry about that. Every single person he taught was a wilder, with a comprehensive suite of gifts. And he was clearly used to teaching the older kids, the ones who knew basic theory and had gotten to the point where their default state was being unshielded. So he hit the ground running—and so did I.
I expected it to be grueling. In some respects, it was. My background in ceremonial magic was pretty thin, so I had to learn a lot of smaller things on the fly to make a disruption spiral work. They were constructs of pure power, designed to do what it said on the tin: disrupt any other effect within their zone of influence. As defensive measures went, they certainly had their limitations, but Guan had chosen well; I could fling one of these down around myself, or even at a distance, and buy myself time to prep something else.
The thing that surprised me was how easy it was to power the spiral. I still thought of myself as I’d been last September: talented at divination, pretty decent at the telepathic sciences overall, weak on the telekinetics, and struggling with a childhood block against ceremonial magic. But under Guan’s tutelage, I realized for the first time that I was, in fact, a wilder. I might not know how to do things, but in terms of pure gift, my weaknesses were gone.
That realization was exhilarating. Guan walked me through the construction of a spiral, having me copy him as he went, then made me do it again and again, faster each time. Pretty soon he was throwing minor effects at me, letting me bat them away with my spirals. After a while I realized Julian and Neeya had stopped their work and were watching me.
When Guan finally let me pause, Julian grinned, clapped Neeya on the shoulder, and came over to crouch by my chair. “Nicely done,” he said.
“Thanks,” I answered, a bit breathless from the exertion. “Those are fun.” Then, because Guan had gotten up to talk to Neeya, I asked the question I never would have dared voice in front of him. “Is it possible to make them glow, like they do in the movies?”
Julian laughed. “Yes, if you overclock it enough. But it’s a flagrant waste of power.”
Right then, I felt like I had it to spare. I knew it was possible to overdraw myself, though, even with my newly-amped reserves. I’d done it in the fight with Julian, and the memory of that sobered me like a splash of cold water. Everything I learned here . . . could I be sure I wouldn’t someday use it against my friends?
Yes, because now I knew how to defend myself. Empathy wouldn’t do me much good against physical attacks, but if the Unseelie tried to control my mind again, I could stop them, could burn their touch out of my mind with the sheer human force of my feelings.
But that didn’t stop me from being afraid.
Guan didn’t put me through the wringer any more after that. Instead he talked to me about tactics: how to evaluate a situation, formulate a plan, and adapt it on the fly. Or at least, he started talking about those things. I’d thought of wilder training in terms of the magic they learned, and that was a big part of it, but I was beginning to realize the scope of what I didn’t know was even larger than I’d thought.
I would have stayed at Toby’s until dawn if I could have, but before much longer I was starting to yawn so hugely it made my jaw ache. And I wasn’t the only one who had to get up early the next morning. “We’ll see you tomorrow,” Toby said—a reminder that I, like an idiot, had agreed to do this every night. My advisor Rodriguez would have fainted if I presented him with a course load that looked anything like my life these days.
Julian must have been thinking something similar, because as we walked away he said, “We can take it slower, if you want.”
I shook my head. “No. I need—I want—to learn as much as I can, while I can.”
He heard what I didn’t say. If I ended up under the deep shield, these practices would be over until the government decided I could be trusted. Which might be days, weeks, months, years.
Neither of us said anything more. But the whole way home, I was reviewing disruption s
pirals in my head.
~
FAR’s offices sat on the top floor of a fifteen-story building, with views across the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington. The fancy location wasn’t psychically necessary; the entire floor was wrapped in enough shields that we could have been parked in the middle of the Metro Center station and it wouldn’t have disrupted our readings. But if a divination firm wanted government contracts, they had to impress Capitol Hill types, and so here we were.
I shouldn’t have thought of it in terms of “we.” After all, I was only an intern. Technically speaking, my only responsibilities were the mundane tasks of filing and reporting and making sure the precogs had all the equipment they needed. But the president of Future Advisory Research was a friend of my mother’s from back when his firm had been based in Georgia, and she’d pulled strings to make sure I wouldn’t be wasting my time here. She might be disappointed that I wasn’t pursuing a more sorcerous career, but if I was determined to specialize in divination, she would at least make sure I got valuable work experience.
And that had been when I was just an ordinary blood, a divination major with a tarot hobby from the age of twelve. Now that I’d been turned into a wilder, Adam was panting to make good use of my gift. I hadn’t bothered pointing out to him that the change hadn’t done much to boost my precognitive abilities: I was too eager to be useful.
The offices were quiet as I came through the glass doors at about eight-thirty. The hush had unnerved me at first; it made me feel as if I were in a library, the sort where the librarian could kill you with a look if your chair scraped the floor too loudly. It was a side effect of the shielding, Adam had told me — that, and the fact that most of the work done there didn’t involve any sound louder than a deck of cards shuffling. Still, I found myself walking carefully, as if the plush carpet wouldn’t muffle my steps into silence anyway.
Mariko was behind the reception desk, sorting through a stack of files. She nodded toward Adam’s office when she saw me. “Wants to see you. Knock before you go in, though; he may be on the phone.”
My pulse quickened. I’d been assigned some readings before, but usually Mariko handed those out. Adam only handled the big-ticket cases.
Or it might be nothing to do with divination. Maybe this was fallout from the thing with Stutler and Kutty. Or maybe he just wanted to know how my meeting with Ramos had gone. I nodded thanks to Mariko and headed toward Adam’s office.
His door was open, removing any need for me to knock. “Come on in,” Adam said when he saw me in the doorway, and gestured for me to take a seat. While I did so, he retrieved a file from the stack on his desk and wheeled himself around to join me.
The file resting on his knees had a red border.
Adam saw me looking and grinned. “Yes, it’s for you. Take a look and let me know what you think.”
Red borders marked governmental contracts. They weren’t the only people FAR contracted with; we also handled plenty of business readings, even some individual matters for people rich enough and egotistical enough to want a big-name company looking into their personal futures. I knew perfectly well that not all of the governmental contracts were interesting: it was as likely to be earthquake prediction for the US Geological Survey as scrying on a heavily-armed extremist militia group in Wyoming. But this was the first time Adam had let me touch one of those files, let alone asked my opinion on it.
Curious, I flipped the cover open. The red border wasn’t the only thing that piqued my curiosity. Adam did this sometimes, sounding out a diviner before assigning a job. He was looking for resonance — some kind of connection that would make the reading more successful. What kind of connection did he imagine I might have?
The file didn’t provide many clues. It looked like a fairly routine piece of work, forecasting trends in illegal drug use — no, drugs that hadn’t yet been made illegal. Okay, so the client wanted to know where the danger points were, what would be the next hot thing for teenagers to snort or huff or inject or whatever. Not exactly my scene, even when I was in high school.
But Adam wouldn’t have handed it to me for no reason. I ran my finger down the edge of the paper, hoping to pick up traces from the client. Something about it felt tantalizingly familiar, but it was too faint for me to identify. My gift murmured in approval, though. It had ideas about this one.
“I’ll give it a shot,” I said cautiously. In fairness, that might have been my answer even if I’d felt nothing at all. Adam was giving me first crack at something important; it was a huge amount of trust to put in a twenty-one-year-old intern. Refusing that would have been hard.
But I wasn’t lying: I thought I stood an actual chance with this one. Adam must have believed me, because he nodded his head toward the back hall. “Take any free room. Think you can be done by lunchtime?”
However eager I was to prove myself, I knew better than to promise that. “If you mean a preliminary read, sure. Actual stats are going to take longer.”
He grinned up at me. “Good girl. Take all the time you need.”
So this was a test, at least in part. That didn’t quiet my nerves any. My palms were damp as I took the file to the locker where I kept my gear. What game was Adam playing? Other than “find out just what the intern’s capable of.” That part was obvious.
The locker was less to keep anyone from stealing my cards, more to keep them shielded from outside influence. Companies like FAR practiced a vastly higher level of psychic hygiene than I’d ever bothered with at college. Then again, nobody at Welton had ever asked me to produce a statistical analysis of the probabilities I sensed, either. They saved that kind of thing for the grad students.
I took my cards out of their silver-lined alcove and grabbed a map of the United States on my way to one of the divination rooms. I would save the pendulum and the planchette for after lunch, when I buckled down to try and get regional detail, but for now the map could stand in for the querent. These kinds of impersonal questions were much harder to get a read on — and truth be told, even if I hadn’t formed an ambition to become a Guardian, FAR’s line of work was not the kind of divination I wanted to do. It was just too abstract. But the experience was valuable, and I enjoyed the challenge of bending my mind in new directions.
All the standard divination rooms were permanently shielded against the outside world. Even the best-built shields, though, got weakened by doors opening and people passing through, so there was a framework built into the walls and windows that made it easy to add a second layer once I was inside. Then, just for practice, I constructed a third layer, this one without the framework to assist. It was the main thing Julian had been able to teach me, after studying it so intensively with Grayson.
FAR wasn’t paying me to conduct shielding practice, though. I laid out the map and my cards, then opened the file and read it through properly.
The client’s name was missing, but that was no surprise; Adam routinely stripped out identifying information, in case it might bias the reading. This particular file was especially short on concrete details, though. They hadn’t provided a list of specific substances they were worried about — or if they had, Adam had redacted that, too. Probably it had never been there to begin with. They were more interested in effect trends, the kinds of experiences or results people were going to be seeking. I frowned at that. Without individual drugs to use as focal points, it was going to be damned hard to separate chemically-induced effects from the broader social trends of the nation.
Well, I had told Adam I would try. I sat cross-legged on the floor and meditated for a time, focusing on the thrill and danger of the illicit; that would at least help me filter out some of the psychic noise. I probably should have spent some time researching the topic before coming in here. No doubt Adam had noticed my failure to do so. I’d have to make up for that during lunch, before I dug into the statistical details.
Those thoughts weren’t helping me at all. I cleared my mind, focusing instead on my breathing. Wh
at mattered was the gift, more than anything else. My precognitive instincts, and my ability to listen to them.
When I felt ready, I pulled the Moon from the deck to be my significator, then shuffled, cut, and began to lay the cards out.
For a reading like this, where I’d been given a minimal amount of context, I liked to use a Wheel layout. I’d chosen the Moon as my significator because of its associations with illusion, change, madness, and more; it seemed an appropriate match for a drug-related question. Around it I set the first four cards: the nine of swords to the left, the two of pentacles reversed to the right, and then the six of pentacles reversed above, and the five of pentacles below.
The two of pentacles worried me the moment I laid it down. I didn’t know yet what kind of trouble we were looking at, but the right-hand position stood for the near future, and that card said things were going to come crashing down pretty fast. Pentacles also indicated money, so whatever was going on, there would be a big market for it. The sky and root cards were no better. I had pentacles again in both places, telling me that money would be one of the driving forces. But the greed the sky card pointed at wasn’t just for money, it was for something more. Whatever experience the drug was going to grant, I suspected. Down in the root, the five of pentacles depicted beggars shut out of a church: people abandoned, or at least people who felt that way.
Those three fit together. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the nine of swords, though. It was an unpleasant card, full of conflict and impossible decisions, and its position indicated the past. Without context, though, I was having a hard time getting a bead on what conflict it might be pointing at. It could be anything from the return of the Otherworld down to recent economic policies that had pushed people into a bad corner. All the pentacles made me think something like the latter might be it, but I wasn’t sure.
Chains and Memory Page 6
