Chains and Memory

by Marie Brennan

  She wouldn’t want to hurt him. She would try not to. But her subconscious would reject the invasion regardless of her conscious will.

  Kim would never forgive herself if she hurt him, burned him out, killed him. In a choice between that and leaving her subject to the deep shield, though . . . there was no choice.

  Down, and down, and down. The wall of the shield wasn’t a clear landmark, nothing so simple as that—but he recognized the signs of its presence and followed them. Grayson had taught him well. Every shield had a foundation, and for the first time in his life, Julian believed he would find this one.

  There—

  And then with a wrench like every bone being torn from his flesh, he was on the floor beside Kim, out of her spirit, and he was gutted.

  ~

  A scream of denial ripped from his throat. From the inferno of Kim’s power to the cold, flat reality of a world he could no longer sense; from the verge of freeing her to absolute failure. He spun to look, expecting to see a phalanx of Guardians in the doorway, people coming forward with handcuffs and tranquilizers.

  Instead he saw Grayson.

  He didn’t even make it to his feet. His lunge toward her reversed abruptly, telekinesis throwing him against the far wall. “Julian, stop!” Grayson cried, hand outstretched. “You’ll kill her!”

  Kim was struggling to sit up, twisting to get free of her bonds. Julian couldn’t form words. He fought against the force pinning him to the wall, howling, completely helpless, expecting at any second that Grayson would clamp down on his mind to stop him. But she let him go on screaming and knelt to help untie Kim. “Please, listen to me,” Grayson said, the words pouring out of her. “Julian, I’ll unshield you, I swear. But I need you to calm down and not attack me. I was almost too late. I had to act quickly.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kim spat, scuttling clear of Grayson as soon as she was free.

  “The shield,” their professor said, hands clenching around the dangling ropes. “If he could get it off you—and he might—you would have died, Kim. Everyone dies.”

  It cut him off, with a wrench almost as bad as being gutted. When he could speak, Julian’s voice was raw. “Everyone?”

  She sighed, going limp. “Everyone they’ve ever tried to remove it from. They did try, back in the early days. Yes, it’s useful to have a leash on wilders; I’m sure there have been any number of politicians and government agents who were glad for a weapon like that in their arsenal. But not everybody wanted it to be that way. They tried to free the ones who were grown up, fully trained.” Grayson shook her head wearily and stood, dropping the ropes on the floor. “It killed them. The foundation of the shield can’t be removed without killing you.”

  The only thing holding Julian up was Grayson’s telekinetic cage. The room went away, and Kim and Grayson with it. All he could see was whiteness, the deafening silence of impossibility. All his life, he had one single, driving purpose — and now it was gone. No amount of training or cleverness or effort could ever bring him to his goal.

  What snapped him back into his body was the sudden return of his gifts. Grayson had done as she promised, dropping the deep shield. Kim was there, one hand on his shoulder; he could feel her fingers trembling. “Julian . . . ?”

  He clutched her hand in his own, each of them gripping the other hard enough to cut off circulation. The door to the room was closed, and with the shields on this room, no sound would escape to the rest of the office. Gods only knew what the people out there thought was going on. “How did you know?”

  “About the shield, or about you trying to remove it?” Grayson sighed, looking weary. Her hair had been white since her days as an active Guardian, but for the first time she seemed old. “I knew about the shield because I got curious years ago, and learned enough that I had to sign an agreement saying I wouldn’t share the classified information I’d uncovered. Which means I haven’t told you any of this, of course. As for you . . .”

  She stood for a moment, arms hanging limp at her sides. Then she turned to face him. Julian avoided her gaze by reflex, but she didn’t move, and after a moment he met her eyes.

  “It was obvious what you were after in my classes,” she said. The compassion in her voice was almost too much to bear. “There wasn’t any harm in teaching you, though, because there was no way in hell you could get at the root of the shield without training even I can’t give you. Until I heard that some dust had gone missing from lockup, and started investigating. Then it was just a matter of tracking you down.”

  Which meant Neeya might be in very deep trouble. Julian knew he should worry about that, and what was going to happen to himself and Kim. But he couldn’t feel anything.

  “I’m sorry.”

  It took him a moment to realize the whisper came from Grayson. He’d never heard her like that before, quiet and full of pain. The way a friend might speak.

  She wasn’t a friend. She had gutted him.

  To stop him from killing Kim.

  He believed her. As much as he wanted to, Julian couldn’t pretend, even for an instant, that Grayson was lying. Or that she had her facts wrong, that somebody else had fed her a lie. If she said there was no way to remove the shield safely, then it was true.

  Kim was in his arms, without him having made a conscious decision to embrace her. Which of them was holding the other one up, he couldn’t even tell. But it was Kim who turned her head enough to look at Grayson and say, “What now?”

  The professor shook her head. “Nothing. That is—I’m not going to report you. There’s no benefit that can come from it. And if I can cover up the way the dust got to you, I will.”

  It was a mercy beyond Julian’s ability to articulate. By all rights the two of them should have been arrested, and Neeya along with them.

  But Grayson shouldn’t have been able to do anything to help them.

  “How?” he asked, raising his head from Kim’s shoulder. “How did you know about the dust being gone, and how are you able to do anything about it? Unless—”

  Grayson nodded. “Unless I’m active again. The paperwork went through yesterday. I couldn’t do anything about the courts, Kim, and I couldn’t stop them from putting this thing on you; the least I could do was to try and give the pair of you something to do other than going out of your heads. I’ll be training you both for Guardianship.”

  He felt Kim’s swift inhale. She had wanted to be a Guardian before she ever became a wilder. And for Julian, of course, it was the future he had assumed would be his from childhood onward. To have the roadblocks suddenly removed gave him a purpose again.

  A tiny flicker of light, amid the smoke and ash of his dreams. Not even the geas could compel him to feel delighted by the prospect. But it gave him something to hold onto.

  Chapter Eleven

  The dust must have worn off by the following afternoon, because nobody at the hospital said anything to me about it. I should have asked Julian to look before I went to my appointment . . . but I preferred to risk an official interrogation rather than remind him about what had happened the previous day.

  Deactivating the shield was no big ceremony at all. One minute I had a giant hole in my spirit; the next, my gifts came flooding back. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, stepping from grey Kansas into a world of color. I wanted to laugh, sing, reach out with my psychic senses just because I could.

  But I didn’t. I remembered Julian’s stories. When wilder kids left the creche and moved into the main training facility, they were brought to a special room and unshielded for the first time since infancy. Invariably they lost control, whereupon the teachers gutted them again, and that set the pattern for the rest of their training: you only got to keep your gifts so long as you used them responsibly. I wasn’t a kid, and I wasn’t about to lose control — but any sign of frivolous behavior would have sent the wrong message. And I didn’t want to give them even the slightest excuse to lock me down again.

  So I sat patiently,
focusing on my breathing, letting Dr. Cooper into my mind to make certain I had healed. If anything was going to go wrong, it would be here. I had no way of guessing whether Julian’s attempt or the fairy dust itself had left any marks on me. Cooper must not have seen anything out of the ordinary, though, because he nodded in mingled satisfaction and relief. “Everything looks excellent. Are you ready for the key?”

  It occurred to me that Cooper had both of my keys: the one that triggered the deep shield, and the one that took it down again. He was a strong psychic, but I was a wilder . . .

  No. If I smashed into his mind and took the second key, I’d only make things worse for myself. He’d gut me on the spot, and the unlocking key wouldn’t do me any good; I couldn’t use it on myself, not with my gifts sealed away. Then they’d probably throw me back into surgery and craft new keys, and all I would have done was prove that I couldn’t be trusted.

  So I sat like a good little girl and nodded, and he touched my mind and showed me how to rip my own heart out.

  After that I was free — or at least I had the illusion of freedom. The knowledge that they could take all this away from me at any time made the bright afternoon seem dark.

  I didn’t go home immediately. Instead I walked to a nearby park, built a cone of silence the way Guan had taught me, and called Liesel.

  Pouring the whole thing out to her took a while. Fortunately — this being D.C. — sitting in a park under a cone of silence, talking to my port’s earpiece, didn’t look out of place at all. I wasn’t supposed to be telling her the classified information Grayson had shared with us . . . but spilling secrets wasn’t exactly new for this city, either.

  “Lord and Lady,” she said when I was done. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it, but she seemed to be at a loss for other words. “How—how can they do this? How can they keep putting the deep shield on people if it’s a death sentence?”

  “Easy,” I said, with a bitter smile. “They just don’t take it off. Ever.”

  “Yes, but—” We were on voice only, so I couldn’t see her expression, only listen to the strangled sound she made.

  I sighed and leaned back against the trunk of a tree. “I wonder if this is why Ramos backed off. They probably didn’t tell her everything, the shield being lethal and all that — but they might have told her something. It would explain why she used to be in favor of mandating removal, then suddenly got cold feet.”

  Liesel hmmmed in my ear. “If so, then you might be able to get her on board with a replacement.”

  “We’d have to have one first,” I said. “Nobody’s going to chuck out the Cairo Accords for a will o’ the wisp.”

  “It would only be one part of the Accords. But you’re right; we’d need a concrete plan. One that stands a chance of actually working. We have some ideas, but . . .”

  But “we” consisted of a handful of college students and some of their professors. They’d been keeping me updated; I knew what they’d come up with so far. Kamiya shunts, power reservoirs, early empathic conditioning — that one was almost guaranteed to leave the kids with a pathological fear of their own gifts — a temporary geas, if we could persuade the Seelie to teach us how to craft one. Every idea had a flaw. It was unethical, or it would produce bad side effects, or it required too large an investment of resources to be politically feasible.

  “I know that silence,” Liesel said, and I heard her smile through my earpiece. “You’re thinking. And planning. I like the sound of that silence.”

  It made me laugh. An actual laugh, free of bitterness or tension; it felt like I hadn’t done that in years. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I may try approaching Ramos, see if I can get some backing for at least a preliminary discussion of this. I can’t say I’m eager to talk to her right now, but — well. It would be nice to give Julian something to hope for.”

  “How’s he doing?” Liesel asked quietly.

  I drew my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them. “He’s . . . not well.” An understatement so bald as to almost be a lie. “I’m worried about him, Liesel. He hasn’t spoken much, not even to me. It’s like something inside him has died.”

  Her slow exhalation sounded like wind in the trees. “He’s dedicated so much of his life to getting rid of the shield. Finding out that it’s just flat-out impossible—on top of being told he almost killed you—”

  I nodded, even though she couldn’t see it. “I think if you’d asked him a month ago what he had to live for, he would have listed a bunch of things. But this one got ripped away, and he’s bleeding out through the hole it left behind.”

  Liesel was silent for a long moment. Down on the sidewalk, people came and went: men and women in suits, a few military types. For all the upheaval in the world, look at any random place, and life there would still seem pretty normal.

  To me, it had the look of the quiet before the storm.

  Another sigh. “I want to get on a plane and fly out there,” Liesel said. “Except I don’t know that it would do any good. If he isn’t talking to you, he wouldn’t talk to me, either. Much less let me get at his head.”

  She was right, but still— “I wish you were here.”

  “Do you want me to come?” she asked seriously. “I don’t know how soon I can be there, and I’d have to talk to my parents about the plane ticket, but I could try.”

  “You’ve got school.”

  “So? I mean, I can’t move out there for the rest of the year. But I could blow off classes for a week.”

  Would it be better or worse to have her company for a little while, and then to wave goodbye? “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe. But I know it’s expensive.” With a shock like the bottom of my stomach falling out, I wondered what my own financial situation was. I still hadn’t talked to my parents, and they were the ones covering my rent. With my internship on hold, was I still going to get my paychecks? Or was I going to get wages as a Guardian trainee?

  Banal questions, and things I had totally ignored in the fog of my obsession with the shield. I could hardly forget the latter—but I needed to start paying attention to the world around me again.

  And trying to get Julian to do the same.

  “I’ll look into it,” Liesel said. “In the meanwhile, you can call me whenever. I mean it. Even if it’s the middle of the night for me.”

  Just hearing her say that helped, even if I knew I’d only wake her as a last resort. “Thanks, Liesel. For everything.”

  ~

  We didn’t talk much on our way to the Aegis Building, which was the local headquarters for Guardians in D.C. Ten a.m. was past the usual rush hour, so we had no trouble getting two seats away from everyone else. Julian’s hand lay unmoving in mine, as if he’d accepted the clasp for my sake, but not for his own. I feared I recognized his mood: grim resolution. This was the world he had to live in, and so he would soldier on.

  It wasn’t enough. But I was afraid to offer him the thread of hope I’d gotten from Liesel, for fear that it, too, would break.

  At least today would offer some distraction. We checked in at the door, then got shunted off to an office where a man processed our paperwork with admirable efficiency. Once our training IDs had been imprinted with our magical signatures, he directed us down into the basement, where Grayson waited in one of the shielded rooms.

  “Your handbooks are on the table,” she said when we came in, not looking up from her own paperwork. Two books lay waiting for us, twins to the one I’d seen Neeya studying at Toby’s house. The rest of the room was more or less bare, except for a circle chalked in one corner. “Read those every spare moment you have. In theory you aren’t held to the same behavioral standards as registered Guardians, but that’s the same theory that says you won’t jump in to help out with any magical problem you see. And gods help you if you get on the bad side of the Corps’ legal team.” The book was a floppy brick in my hands. Well, I didn’t have to wonder what to do with my evenings anymore.

  Gra
yson scribbled one last line and put her pen down. “All right. Julian, I want you to construct a containment field around the circle I laid down over there. I’ll inspect your work in a moment. Kim, to begin with I’ll be giving you a condensed form of the banishing course sequence you started at Welton.”

  The word condensed set off more than a few warning bells. The few weeks I’d had of Lesser Banishing Rituals under Grayson’s eye had been intensive enough, not just magically—that was less of a concern now—but mentally. And now she was going to give the rest of it to me at high speed?

  Yes, she was. Grayson started off with a rapid lecture on the underlying principles used to banish spiritual entities from an area, then showed me a method that was nothing like what she’d been teaching in class. Instead of chalking my own circle, I had to weave a net I could throw over my target. She ran through it once, then a second time. I was in the middle of scribbling notes when I heard her voice in my head. Get it wrong.

  What?

  “Now you try,” she said out loud.

  I must have looked stupid, sitting there with my mouth open, because she gave me a withering look and said, “Were my instructions not clear?”

  Yes, they were—both of them. What I didn’t know was why. I hadn’t expected to be given this kind of training so soon; I wasn’t eager to screw up the first thing she asked me to do.

  But Grayson wouldn’t have given that order without good reason.

  I licked my lips and concentrated. Even if I had to botch this, I wanted to think through the procedure correctly, to avoid training myself into a bad habit. So when I spun the web, I made very sure I knew which strand I had left out.

  That absence made the structure fall apart before I was even done. “Again,” Grayson said, and echoed it in my thoughts.