Chains and Memory

by Marie Brennan

  She’d known me since freshman year, and was one of the best empaths I’d ever met. Even without psychic cues to help her, Liesel knew exactly what to say to me. “Neither did you,” she said, and managed something like a smile. “Your declaration has been playing on the news all night.”

  Julian appeared in the bedroom doorway, out of the camera’s sight line. I waved for him to join me on the bed, where Liesel could see him. His arm went around my shoulder, fitting me against his side, and I saw Liesel notice. Gods — I’d been looking forward to telling her about the changes here, the understanding he and I had reached. That seemed like years ago.

  But she didn’t comment on it. “Hi, Julian. How are you holding up?”

  He shrugged the question away. “I’m fine. They haven’t done anything to me.”

  “They’ve done the thing you hate most to the woman you love,” Liesel said, with surprising bluntness. It struck home; Julian’s fingers tensed on my arm. “You both need support right now. I wish I weren’t so far away!”

  If I could have teleported her there on the spot, I would have. Or would I? I remembered how our time at Welton had ended. The stress of supporting me through the return of the Otherworld had turned her into a temporary wreck, because she was always the one who gave help, never the one who asked for it. I used to call her the most seelie person I knew, before the actual Seelie showed up and made the slang usage awkward. It was good for Liesel to be at home with her family, good for her to get some distance from my problems.

  I remembered something Julian had said to me a few weeks ago, about his unexpected phone call from Robert. “Liesel — you’ve been trying to come up with a replacement for the shield, right? You and Robert, and everybody else from the Palladian Circle.”

  “Not just them,” she said. “I’ve been talking to some of my professors about it, too. Not with specifics, of course. We — well, we don’t have anything really workable yet, but if you want, I can tell you what we’ve thought of.”

  “No,” I said. I wasn’t usually so curt with her, but I didn’t have the energy to spare for indirection. “I mean, yes. I’m glad people are working on that. But right now, you know what my priority is; you saw it on the news. I’m going to break this fucking thing. Or Julian is. I don’t really care who does it, so long as it gets done. You can help me with that.”

  She sat up straighter. “How?”

  Her determination was so palpable, even without psychic contact, that it made me feel stronger. “I don’t really know yet. You can’t look at the shield directly — not unless you know some Fiain in Germany — but I need information. Details about how the shield works, how it got developed. That might give me a clue.”

  “I know some of that already,” Liesel said. “I was looking it up for Robert weeks ago. I can send you what I sent him. Has he been in touch yet?”

  “No.”

  Her expression softened. “He will be. Knowing him, he’s pacing his dorm room right now with your number half-dialed, trying to figure out what to say.”

  She was probably right. In his shoes, I wouldn’t have known what to say, either. “Send me anything you’ve got on the shield, no matter how off-base it seems. Stories about that one time something weird happened but it’s probably just an urban legend. If there’s anything out there that says how to break this thing, I’m willing to bet the powers that be have tried to discredit it.” That would be a lot more effective than trying to squash it entirely. Information never really died.

  Judging by the downward tilt of her head, Liesel was scribbling notes. She glanced up long enough to say, “I’ll see if I can’t get my mother to help, too. She—”

  Her voice cut off like somebody had hit it with a cleaver. I must have shown something in my expression. “Oh, Lord and Lady,” Liesel breathed. “What happened?”

  “I did,” Julian said, before I could find the words to explain.

  “That’s not fair,” I countered. My voice came out clogged. Gods damn it all, I was not going to start crying again. “You’re not the problem. My mother is. Her and her stupid prejudices. She can’t cope with you; she can’t cope with me. So to hell with her.”

  I knew Liesel almost as well as she knew me. I knew perfectly well that sooner or later she and I were going to talk about what I had just said, because she couldn’t let a declaration like that stand untouched. But she knew better than to tackle it right then. She only said, “I’ll get started on this right away.”

  Doing the math was reflexive enough that my brain spat out the number even in its ragged state. “For gods’ sakes, Liesel. It’s one a.m. over there.”

  “No time like the present,” she said, with a smile that might have been forced, but reassured me all the same. “Don’t worry, Kim. We’ll find a way out.”

  ~

  My SIF-appointed watchdog was good for one thing: if I didn’t want company, I didn’t have to have any.

  It was the second time in five months that I’d closed my parents out of my life. The first had been after Julian freed me from the Unseelie. Back then I’d refused their company because I couldn’t even live with myself; I was mired in the shock and horror of what I had done, and the thought of seeing them had made me nearly suicidal.

  Now it was pure fury that made me turn them away. My own mother had betrayed me. Right when I needed her most, she hadn’t been there. And not because of work or sheer bad luck, anything I could have forgiven—no. She was gone because she couldn’t cope with what I’d become. There was no forgiving that.

  My father . . . I might be able to talk to him someday. When I wasn’t gutted. When my sick fury at my mother wasn’t bound up in this feeling of unutterable loss. But not right now.

  Liesel would have helped me, but I wasn’t ready yet. For therapy, I poured all my anger and grief and terror into the task I’d set myself, the task to which Julian had dedicated his life: breaking the shield. There had to be a way. I just had to figure out what it was.

  My first idea was a complete non-starter. Lots of shields could be broken if you threw enough power at them; that was why it was so hard to shield a wilder in the first place. Obviously the deep shield wasn’t vulnerable to ordinary levels of power, or Julian would have shattered the damned thing ages ago . . . but the same drug that had gotten me into this mess could theoretically have gotten me out of it again.

  Except that the deep shield fundamentally didn’t work that way. It didn’t stand between my gifts and the world; it stood between me and my gifts. Trying to break it down with sheer force was like trying to kick a door open after someone amputated my legs. I couldn’t even begin the attempt.

  When I told Julian I felt like an idiot for even having considered it, he said, “Consider everything. No matter how stupid it is. If you start writing things off because you know they’re not worth your time, you might miss the answer.” His mouth twisted at the corner. “It’s entirely possible that’s what I’ve done.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Then I’ll start at the beginning.”

  Liesel’s history report arrived in my inbox not half an hour after I got off the phone with her. Some of it I knew already, in vague outline, but she’d dug up details I hadn’t seen before. The shield had been developed by a researcher in Mexico, a woman named Dr. Araceli Medina Perez. Her doctorate was in psychiatry, not one of the psychic sciences; this was barely ten years after First Manifestation, when degree programs were only just getting started. The U.S. organization that funded her research had tried to patent the shield, seeing an opportunity to make a quick buck, but Dr. Medina Perez was more interested in saving the lives of wilder children, who in those days had a life expectancy of about a year and a half. She’d contacted colleagues in a dozen different countries and shared the design—after which the organization sued her for breach of contract, but by then the cat was out of the bag.

  “So once upon a time, the specs for this were out in the wild,” I murmured, tapping my stylus against my opposite thum
b. Unfortunately, that time was decades ago. In the interim, the information had either slipped through the cracks . . . or been swept there on purpose.

  Knowing the history was useful, but Medina Perez was a dead end, figuratively and literally. And there was no point contemplating what I would need to raise her ghost; so long as I was gutted, I wasn’t raising anything more mystical than my own hand. I had to look to the present, and that’s what I buckled down to do.

  Julian shared one piece of information with me, because it wasn’t something I could sense on my own right now: there were two layers to the shield. The bit cutting me off from my gifts was the important part, but on its own, it would have left me horribly vulnerable—unable to defend myself from any outside influence. So the structure included a more conventional layer, designed to hold everyone else out. “It’s rudimentary at best,” Julian said. “The idea is that anyone who’s been gutted won’t be walking around out there where they might be at risk; they’ll be watched over by whoever triggered the thing.”

  I shuddered all the way down to my toes, realizing that all of my normal shields were gone. “Can you put another layer on me? Please?” I might not be at risk inside my apartment, but I didn’t feel safe anywhere anymore.

  “Of course,” Julian said, and went to work.

  That sent me off down the path of theory. Shields came in two basic types, active and passive. The former had to be maintained by a supply of power, while the latter were built and then left alone. There was no way the deep shield could possibly be passive; those degraded over time. Unless— “Does anybody do touchups on you guys?” I asked Julian.

  He shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of. And it would be impossible for them to pull it off without anybody noticing. They’d have to refresh the shield on every single wilder on a regular basis—probably multiple times a year.”

  Talking to him drove me a little bit mad, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. Julian’s own shields had always been impeccable, but I never knew how many traces I picked up, even from him, until they were all gone. If talking to Ramos was like watching a screen with the sound muted, being gutted was like going completely deaf. I kept wanting to clear my ears, and I couldn’t. Maybe that was why I’d started talking to myself so much; at least then I could hear the whole conversation.

  The problem with the deep shield being active was, where the hell was the power source? In its dormant state it wouldn’t draw anything, but raising it would require a substantial infusion, and it would continue to draw as long as it was up. I knew the key to gut Julian; he’d given it to me last fall, when he thought the Unseelie might succeed in taking him. It didn’t involve me supplying any energy to the shield. QED, the only possible source was Julian himself.

  I sighed and dropped my head against the back of the couch. “Great,” I muttered. “If only I were a baseline, I’d be free of the shield. That helps so much.”

  Actually, it did—because it gave me an idea. I lifted my head and called out to Julian, who was scrubbing dishes in the kitchen. “Has anybody ever tried to put the deep shield on a blood? An ordinary blood, I mean, not a wilder.”

  He had an answer ready, which meant he’d thought of this before me. He came to the doorway and said, “I don’t know for sure. There’s no clear answer out there, just hints. But I think so—I mean, I think they’ve tried. An Argentinian named Sileoni tried to stage a coup about fifteen years after the design for the shield was widely available, and reading between the lines, it sounds like he wanted to put together an army of bound psychics to support him.”

  “Seems like a safe bet that he wasn’t just inept,” I said. “If it were possible, we’d have at least one dictator somewhere in the world with an army like that. Since there isn’t, let’s assume for the moment that the design of the shield can only work on a wilder. Why?”

  Julian didn’t answer that, and I didn’t expect him to. He gave me facts when he had them, but no speculation, and no leading answers. It was frustrating to reinvent the wheel in front of him, though. After a moment’s consideration, I said, “Power. If it really is drawing on the wilder’s own gifts to make itself go, then a lower blood may not be strong enough to keep it functioning.” I grimaced and tossed my stylus onto the coffee table. “I don’t suppose the sidhe have a drug to suppress gifts, as well as crank them up? If depowering myself back to normal levels would get me out of this, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to take them back. It was easy for me to say that; I’d only been a wilder since late November. For Julian, though, depowering would be like cutting him off at the knees. I knew he would do just about anything to be free of the shield—but would he give up half his gifts for it?

  Judging by the cold consideration he was giving it right now, he might. “A drug like that . . . it’s possible. It certainly isn’t anything they would want us to know about, though.”

  Because we might use it against them. Might? No, we’d use it in a heartbeat. I hunched my shoulders into the couch’s cushion and bit my lip. “You know what I’m thinking, don’t you.”

  “You’re thinking about asking the Seelie to break the shield for us.”

  He didn’t say it like a fresh idea. Everything I thought of, he’d gotten to first. Had he already ruled this one out? “Have you asked them?”

  Julian sank down cross-legged on the floor, shaking his head. “No. I didn’t have the chance last fall. And when Falcon came to see me, I honestly didn’t think of it.” He grimaced. “I was thinking of too many other things.”

  Like the fact that they didn’t actually have faces. “They might refuse,” I pointed out. “Our government wouldn’t be too pleased to hear they’re trying to undermine the shield. Hell, I doubt there’s a government in the world that would like it. If the Seelie are worried about people making nice with the Unseelie, they’re not going to want to do anything that might rock the boat against themselves.”

  “It’s an option,” Julian said. “But not the first one.”

  I had to agree, and not just because of the political ramifications. So long as I was gutted, I didn’t have any way to contact the sidhe — unless one came and knocked on my door, or they started installing comm satellites and selling ports in the Otherworld. Julian could project his spirit out to look for one of them, but it was a good bet that would attract attention from the people whose job it was to police the connection between the worlds. We’d have to wait for our chance.

  The biggest thing that stopped me, though, was the fear I didn’t even like to think about. It crept up on me at night, though, when I was lying sleepless in bed and wishing I kept alcohol in the apartment.

  I’d stood in front of a dozen news cameras and declared I intended to break the deep shield. And yet the government had let me walk away without so much as a warning.

  I doubted they were in favor of me succeeding. With that ruled out, the only possible interpretation was that they weren’t afraid of anything I might do—because the shield simply could not be broken.

  Not even by the sidhe.

  Chapter Eight

  Four days after my release from the hospital, I had an appointment with a DSPA administrator to finalize my transition from ordinary citizen to wilder.

  For this I went to an unremarkable office building tucked away in a back street not far from the respective headquarters of SIF and the Guardian Corps. It was a depressing place, all fanboard partitions and low-burn lighting. The administrator was named Lualhati Masangga, and the first thing she did was slide a sheet of paper across the desk toward me.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  Masangga looked like a motherly sort, but she had the brisk manner of an experienced bureaucrat. She said, “Ordinarily the change of surname is handled as part of transferring a wilder child to the custody of the state. Since you are not a minor, and are still a legal resident of Georgia, we need you to fill out paperwork informing the state of your intent to
change your name. Georgia law also requires that notice be posted once a week for four weeks before the change takes effect, but we’ll take care of that for you.”

  She added that last part as if she were doing me a favor. I gaped at her. In all my focus on the deep shield, I’d forgotten that there were other legal effects from being declared a wilder. “You can’t be serious. I know wilders are supposed to be called Fiain, but—” Words failed me. “You can’t take my last name from me.”

  Masangga tried a motherly smile. She wasn’t very good at it, despite the soft bun and softer features. “I’m afraid it’s a legal requirement, Kim.”

  Normally I preferred my nickname to the full “Kimberly,” but I wanted to snarl at her for using it. “What the hell is the point? I’m a grown adult, not a ward of the state. It isn’t like you don’t have me recorded in the system, regardless of my name.”

  “Please don’t make this difficult, Kim. It’s only a formality.”

  And a pointless one. If wilders were free citizens upon reaching their majority, what was to stop them from filing the paperwork to change their names away from Fiain? I wondered if any of them ever had. Probably not. If Julian and the people at Toby’s were anything to go by, being Fiain was part of their identity, as much tribal as familial.

  But it wasn’t my identity. The only thing that stopped me from balling up the name-change form and throwing it at Masangga was that last thought: family.

  If I truly wanted to leave my mother behind, now was my chance.

  I looked down at the form, and the pen Masangga placed next to it. I’d been Kimberly Argant-Dubois my whole life, one part of it from my mother, the other from my father. I could cut one of my few remaining ties right now, with just a couple of lines on a form. Become Kimberly Fiain. Or flip Masangga the metaphorical bird and make myself just Kimberly Dubois instead—no. My father would never forgive me for that.