“But it isn’t in anybody’s best interests for the world’s most powerful psychics to be emotionally unstable. So they put a lot of effort into making sure wilders are going to be as well adjusted as possible.” Liesel looked both impressed and helpless. “That means employing highly educated empaths to take care of the children’s psychological health.”
I shivered. “Are you saying they manipulate the kids?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not in the way you mean, anyway. That kind of thing . . . it’s unsubtle, and in the long run it isn’t very effective. I think they mostly put their effort into sensing problems early on, and then judging how well the treatments are working. I mean, the goal is to have everyone grow up to be a stable, self-regulating adult. You aren’t going to get that if you’re relying on empathy to shove their emotions in the right direction; they have to learn to do it themselves. Even so—” She paused, clearly wishing she hadn’t started that sentence. But Liesel knew me well enough not to think she could get away with stopping there. “Empathy and psychiatry degrees can’t make everything perfect.”
I thought about the things I’d seen from the other Fiain, from Julian. The way they depended on one another for human comfort, and the hunger in him after so long without it. His initial attempts to deny his feelings for me, because attachment was too great of a risk. And those were the small issues. “He doesn’t deal with the shield very well.”
Liesel’s eyes went wide. “Kim, he basically had a psychotic break last fall.”
The term made me flinch, but I couldn’t really argue with it. After the Unseelie held him prisoner, Julian had more or less gone berserk. At the time I’d chalked it up to the fact that they tortured him . . . but that wouldn’t have sent him over the edge if he hadn’t been close to begin with. It had been the imprisonment, as much as what they did to him, that caused him to lose control so badly. And that was because of the shield.
My fingers ached, digging hard into my arms. “Are you saying I’m going to end up like he is? The other Fiain aren’t.”
“They’ve probably come to terms with it better than he has. And no, I don’t think you will. But it’s a huge psychological stressor, and that’s going to have an effect. That’s what I meant a moment ago: not that I think you’re going to go insane, but that it’s reasonable for you to feel unbalanced from this.” Liesel took a deep breath and smoothed her hair back into a fresh ponytail, as if collecting her thoughts again. “Have they assigned a therapist to you?”
“No.”
“They should,” Liesel said. She put her hands up to stop my next words. “I know, Kim. You don’t want them messing around in your head any more than they already have. But they’ve got specialists, people trained to deal with circumstances a lot like yours. A private therapist isn’t going to be as good at helping you come to terms with this.”
“I don’t want to come to terms with it,” I said violently. “Gods, Liesel—they ripped my gods-damned heart out. I can’t be okay with that. Not even if it sends me crazy. Getting used to that is, is—it would be giving in. Can’t you see that? It would be me saying, okay, this is my life now. I guess I’ll live with it. But I fucking won’t.”
Liesel’s gaze had gone soft and wounded, not for the angry words I’d flung at her, but for the pain that drove them. “I know,” she whispered, and in that moment I hated the thousands of miles that separated us. Liesel was my closest friend, dearer to me than anyone from childhood. Apart from Julian, she was the only person in the world I really trusted right now. I wanted to be back in our dorm room, where she could put her arms around me and help me believe there was a light at the end of the tunnel, something that wasn’t an oncoming train. But she couldn’t be here; her own family had called her home, and I couldn’t fight that. “I know. And it won’t work anyway, not unless you want it to. Or unless they force it on you. But—” Her breath caught, and I realized she was near to crying. So was I. “Kim, how long can you live like this?”
I forced the turmoil down, grasping for calm as if I were about to perform a ritual. “As long as it takes to be free.”
~
Julian came home to find Kim pacing the living room with precise strides. Four steps from one wall to the other, halt, pivot to face the other way. Each movement was as crisp as the movement of a clock. She didn’t pause when Julian opened the door, so he let her be, going to the kitchen to put the groceries away.
He’d only just closed the last cabinet when Kim said, “This isn’t working. And it isn’t going to.”
Not the pacing. Julian went back to the living room and found that Kim had stopped. “What do you mean?”
“The shield. Me trying to break it. Julian, you know a hundred times more about magic than I do, and you’ve been trying to do this your entire life.” She waved away his comment before he could make it. “I know, I know. You don’t remember what it feels like not to have the shield, and I do. But that isn’t enough. It’s been more than seventy years since the shield was invented. I doubt you’re the only wilder who ever decided he couldn’t put up with the damn thing. If it were possible to figure this out by thinking really hard, somebody would have done it by now.”
The words cut deep. No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking: that was a quote from Voltaire, one Dr. Argant had engraved on a plaque in her house. Kim had told him that. It was a foundational tenet of her life, and hearing her admit its limitations was almost an admission of defeat.
Almost. But not quite. The stiffness in Kim’s shoulders was determination, not surrender.
“The sidhe,” Julian said.
“When it comes to magic, we’re like children scribbling in a coloring book compared to them. Everything except empathy, anyway, and the shield isn’t empathic in nature. So if we can build it, they can break it.” She hesitated, then looked down at the carpet. “They told me they could.”
Julian’s hands half-curled before he could stop them. She wasn’t talking about the Seelie.
When Kim had first been turned—when her spirit was bound to the Unseelie as their loyal ally—she’d taunted him with a promise, an offer of freedom from the shield. He’d tried not to think about those days, even though her golden eyes were a constant reminder. The sidhe could lie; they knew that. And the Unseelie could not be trusted.
But that didn’t mean their offer had been completely false.
Julian said, “Anything the Unseelie can do, the Seelie can do as well. But you know as well as I do, that isn’t going to be easy.”
Kim drew in a slow breath, then sank to sit cross-legged on the floor. Julian came forward to join her. She buried both hands in her hair and said, “Politics, yeah. But let’s take this one step at a time. First we’d have to get in touch with them.” She swallowed convulsively, in a way Julian recognized: swallowing down nausea. She still wasn’t used to the shield—and as much as it pained him to see her suffer like this, it would hurt worse to see her adjust to it. “I can’t do it,” she said, soldiering on. “You can, but do we want to bet nobody would notice?”
He held out one hand until she took it, then wrapped his fingers around hers. The contact steadied her. “Then we get somebody else to do it.”
The thought had been in his head for days, but he’d held off on saying anything. Once they started down this road, they were playing with fire; officials who were perfectly content to let a few wilders flail around on their own might step in with serious force if they tried to ally themselves with an alien race. But Kim’s unique situation had been his best hope for breaking the shield with the resources they had. If that was a dead end, they had no choice but to look elsewhere.
Kim’s gaze wandered across the carpet as she thought it through. “None of the Fiain here in D.C. That’s too obvious. But you guys have something like a network, right? We ask somebody in, oh, California, or—” She stopped, and made a sound that was the closest thing to a laugh Julian had heard from her since her mother came to visit.
“In another country.”
“Not a wilder,” he said, seeing where she aimed. “Robert.”
“He’s known to be our friend, so it isn’t the most subtle route . . . but a stranger probably wouldn’t do this for us, and he would. It’s worth a try.” She twisted to look at the time, displayed on the lower corner of the living room screen. “Shall we call him?”
“Not from either of our ports,” Julian said. “We can be a bit more subtle than that.”
Chapter Nine
My SIF watchdog didn’t like it when I said we were going to Eastern Market, to the townhouse where I had practiced for weeks.
“Apparently you guys have known for a while what I was doing there,” I pointed out, leaning in the doorway of my living room. I knew I looked confrontational, with my arms crossed over my chest, but I was long past caring. “What exactly do you think I can do there while I’m gutted that I couldn’t do when I was whole?”
Like wilders, agents were trained not to show a lot of emotion. I wondered if my watchdog had flunked that class, or been out sick, because he shifted his feet uncomfortably and glanced away. “I don’t have clearance for you to go there, ma’am.”
“Clearance?” I laughed in his face. “Let’s settle this matter once and for all. Am I or am I not a free citizen, with the right to go where I please and do what I please, so long as I am not committing a crime? Because if you want to violate my civil liberties, go right ahead. My lawyer hasn’t left town yet, and I imagine he’d be delighted to take on another case for me.”
To that, my watchdog had no response. And so Julian and I went to Toby and Marcus’ townhouse.
Toby met us at the door, as usual. Except there was nothing usual about this; it was the first time he’d seen me since I was gutted. Sympathy didn’t show on his face, but the way he said my name, quiet and low, spoke volumes. “Kim. We didn’t expect to see you.”
I affected a casual shrug. “Yeah, well. Sitting around at home got old. And until they find a better plan for training me than shipping me off to the Elk State Forest, I might as well hang out with fellow Fiain.”
Both my reference to the Center and my use of the term “Fiain” registered on him; he let me see it. Then he opened the door wider. “By all means, then, come on in.”
“Who all is here?” Julian asked when the door was closed behind us. My SIF watchdog remained out on the street, in the car he’d used to drive us here. I hadn’t been very polite, telling him he wasn’t welcome in the house.
“Marcus, Neeya, Kasi, and Eliot,” Toby said. “We haven’t seen much of Guan lately.”
Because there was nobody around who needed his teaching. But Julian had predicted he wouldn’t be there, and Plan B was good to go. He and I went in search of Neeya.
I expected her to be in the basement. Instead she was out on the back porch, curled up on a porch swing that, judging by the mildew, hadn’t seen much use in years. Julian cocked his head at the book in her lap. Neeya lifted it to show him, grimacing. “Procedure. Of the non-magical sort. How to deal with civilians in a crisis, that kind of thing.”
She wasn’t subtle enough to hide the fact that she was ignoring me. It looked different from all the other times she’d ignored me, though. Less hostility, more . . . reluctance? Because I was gutted, probably. It reminded me of the way people ignored strangers in wheelchairs. Awkwardness, mixed with the creeping thought of what if that happened to me?
Or in this case, I know what that feels like, all too well.
Julian said, “Neeya, I have a favor to ask. One that might get you into trouble—though I don’t think it will.”
The prospect made her shrug. “Whatever. What do you need?”
“Your port,” Julian said. “To call someone in Ireland.”
She dug it out of her back pocket and tossed it to him. “I’ll be inside. Plausible deniability and all that. Maybe it fell out of my pocket while I was sitting here.” She took her book and went in, leaving us alone on the porch.
Julian perched gingerly on the edge of the swing, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell. As I joined him, I saw he was signing into his own account and sending a quick message to Robert: Incoming. “Good idea,” I murmured. Robert might well ignore a call from a strange account. Julian gave it a minute or two to go through, then dialed.
It had to be nearly midnight in Ireland by then, but fortunately for us Robert was a night owl. He picked up after two rings. One eyebrow rose when he saw the two of us crowded into the camera’s range. “How very cloak-and-dagger of you,” he remarked. “The lighting is particularly dramatic.”
Glancing up, I saw that the porch bulb was almost directly above us, lighting our faces in chiaroscuro. “Unintentional,” I said. “The staging, at least. Calling from someone else’s port—that part, yeah.”
His image retreated slightly from the screen, as if he had leaned back in his chair. I suspected he would be steepling his fingers, if he didn’t have to use one hand to hold his port. Robert had a great love for the dramatic; of course this setup would please him. “What merits such caution? Are we plotting rebellion?”
“Yes,” Julian said.
At that word, Robert’s attempt at humor fell away like a cloak. “Tell me what you need.”
“The sidhe,” I said. “Are there many in Ireland right now?”
“Lord and Lady, yes.” Robert rolled his eyes. “Seelie and Unseelie both, the latter ingratiating themselves with those who affect to be rebels. A recent report claimed we have no less than seventeen different cults in their honor—plus a few societies in protest, of course.”
It was a more friendly balance than we had here in the U.S. Not surprising; after First Manifestation, thousands of romantically-minded bloods had flocked to Ireland, making it the center of the psychic renaissance. Of course the sidhe would appear there in greater numbers, and find a warmer reception.
Which made it ripe for our purposes. Julian said, “We need to get a message to the Seelie, without the authorities here noticing. Do you think you can do that?”
“Simplicity itself,” Robert said breezily. I suspected he would have answered the same had Julian asked whether Robert could nip down to Hell and retrieve a soul or two. He affected calm, but the rhythmic vibration of his image said his leg was jittering at high speed, down where we couldn’t see. As much as he enjoyed the intellectual challenge of dreaming up a replacement for the shield, the chance to take direct action was better.
“The message is brief,” Julian said. He and I had discussed this before leaving the apartment, agreeing that we shouldn’t say any more than we had to. “Tell them we need to talk to one of them—preferably Shard. And it needs to be discreet.”
Robert passed up the chance to claim that Discretion was his middle name, which told me how seriously he was taking this. “As discreet, I presume, as borrowing another’s port to make a call to a foreign country to pass your message along by indirect routes. Need the meeting be in person?”
We had spoken to the sidhe psychically before, projecting our spirits into the gap between our world and theirs. Whether that could be spied on or not, we didn’t know, but it was a moot point. “Kim can’t project,” Julian said quietly. “And we don’t know when they’ll lift the shield. In theory a call could work, at least to start, but this port is only borrowed; there isn’t any good way for them to call us back without it potentially being noticed.”
I’d wrapped my arms around my middle at the inevitable reminder. Robert, I could tell, hadn’t realized it was presently active on me; he blanched at Julian’s words, and stammered over his reply. “Yes, ah, I see. I will let them know. Is there a timeline on this?”
“Yesterday,” I said, knowing it came out bleak.
~
When we’d settled things with Robert, Julian went back inside to return Neeya’s port to her. I stayed on the swing, arms still wrapped around myself, trying to swallow down the taste of sickness in my mouth.
I cou
ldn’t argue with what Liesel had said—but I couldn’t go along with it, either. The thought of accepting a therapist from the DSPA . . . it just wouldn’t work. You had to trust a therapist before they could do much for you, and there was no way in hell I would. Even if they were the nicest, most genuinely sympathetic therapist in the world. Not after the way I’d been betrayed. And even a private therapist couldn’t help me come to terms with something I was determined to reject.
That was probably why it hadn’t worked on Julian, either. Most of the wilders I’d met seemed . . . not at peace with the shield; that was overstating it. But able to live with it, in a way he couldn’t. It would be to the Center’s benefit—to everybody’s—if all wilders felt like that. But they couldn’t force that equilibrium on the Fiain, not if they wanted it to stick. And if Julian had decided in childhood that he wasn’t going to accept the shield, then no amount of therapy would make it happen.
The screen door swung open. I looked up, expecting Julian, and found it was Neeya instead.
She clearly had thought I’d gone back inside, because she stopped dead, letting the door slam shut behind her. The rush of air was cold on my cheeks, and I realized I’d been crying, tears slipping out without me noticing.
We stared at each other in silence. Neeya held her book in one white-knuckled hand, like she didn’t know whether to start reading or throw it at me.
The words came out before I could stop them. “What did I do to set you against me?”
She scowled and dropped her book on the dirt-scarred porch table. Her body half-turned, as if she was going to go back inside, but she didn’t reach for the door. I persisted. “You aren’t jealous. I’m pretty sure of that. I believe you love Julian, but I don’t think it’s romantic. Is it just that I’m not Fiain? Do you think I don’t belong here?” A harsh laugh escaped me. “You’re probably right. But I don’t belong anywhere else, either.”
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