Chains and Memory

by Marie Brennan

  I laid the remaining eight cards in a circle around the first five, hoping they might clear it up. Fewer pentacles here: I got a couple of wands, a couple of cups, Temperance reversed, and on the last card —

  The last card was the outcome, the piece that tied it all together. I hadn’t even begun to think about what the previous seven cards told me, much less how they fit in with the first five; drawing conclusions based on one card was not best practice for tarot reading.

  But the instant I saw it, I knew.

  The High Priestess, reversed. She could indicate a lot of different things; many of the Major Arcana were complex that way. When I laid the card down, though, my thoughts made an intuitive leap, from the seated woman of the image to psychic powers to the purpose of this entire reading.

  The drug I was casting for . . . it was the powder the Unseelie had used to turn me into a wilder.

  The stuff wasn’t a drug, not the way we generally used that term. Last I’d heard, nobody really knew what it was—nobody human, anyway, and the sidhe weren’t telling. Somebody had dubbed it “fairy dust,” and the name stuck. The CDC guys who examined me thought it was some kind of retrovirus in powdered form; that was their best guess for how it had triggered the mutation in my DNA. But I’d also been questioned by people from the DEA, because the way the sidhe used it was more like a drug.

  And that was exactly the way humans would treat it, once they got their hands on the stuff.

  I quickly swept the cards together and began a second layout, this time with my thoughts focused on the powder. Even if the client wasn’t asking about fairy dust, I needed to know. Other people would need to know, so they could take action before things got bad.

  Sometimes the cards were cryptic, but not this time. If that powder became available to the general populace, it would find buyers. Bloods wanting to jack their gifts up to higher levels — that was how the sidhe used it on themselves, though for them the effect was temporary. “You bloody fools,” I whispered, fingers tightening on the remainder of the deck. I survived the transition, but that was no guarantee anybody else would be as lucky. The same transition had killed my brother Noah, years ago.

  It wasn’t worth the risk. But that wouldn’t stop people from trying.

  They wouldn’t be the only market, though. There were a thousand snake-oil salesmen out there, promising baselines that a secret regimen of herbs or meditation or whatever would unlock their hidden potential, triggering the awakening that nature hadn’t bestowed. If this powder could deliver on those promises, the sidhe could have a good percentage of the world’s non-psychic population eating out of their hands.

  My hands were shaking badly enough that I had to lay the deck down. Had Adam known what this query was about when he handed me the file? Or did he pick me because his own gift prodded him? I wouldn’t be surprised if the client kept the identity of the “drug” even from him. Whether it was the DEA or the CDC — and I would lay money it was one of the two, if not a joint team of both — they might very well want to keep the details under wraps. But I would have to put my suspicions in my report, and Adam would see that.

  Better to tell him now. I reached out to gather up the cards, but caught myself before I touched them. This second spread wasn’t technically part of my assignment, but I had to record it anyway. There was a box of spare forms in the corner; I grabbed one and wrote out the layout in a quick scrawl, along with a summary of my impressions. Then, file and form in hand, I went to find Adam.

  He was in the hallway talking to Latonya, the firm’s best runecaster. She was facing me as I came out, and put a hand on Adam’s to stop him mid-sentence. Distress had frayed my shields; I was leaking empathic cues to an embarrassing degree. Or maybe it was just my expression that warned her. Adam twisted his head to look over his shoulder, and his eyebrows shot up. “We’ll finish this later?” he said to Latonya. It was more of a statement than a question, and she nodded. “Kim, follow me.”

  A moment later we were back in his office, with the door shut behind us. “What happened?” he asked.

  I swallowed, steadying my breathing. “Shields?”

  He closed his eyes briefly, and my ears suddenly felt stuffed with cotton. I opened my jaw to pop them. Adam said, “Speak.”

  Fear had carried me this far, but now caution slowed me. I held up the file. “Do you know who this came from?” He nodded. “Do you know what they’re after? The specifics, I mean.”

  “No,” Adam admitted. “That is—I know there’s some specific substance they’re worried about, not just general trends. And although they didn’t say this, I suspect it has something to do with the sidhe.”

  Which explained why he’d passed it to me. I put the file down on the end of his desk, pressed my hand flat against it as if the force would make this any easier. “I had a suspicion of my own, so I performed another reading. And. Um.” The paper was inside the folder. I should never have filled it out; I should have thought the implications through before racing to tell Adam. “I know I’m an intern, and what I’m about to say is crazy. But . . . I need to go over your head on this one. I need to talk to the client directly—without you there.”

  Adam’s eyes widened, and his hands fell to the rims of his chair’s wheels. “Kim—I shouldn’t have even given you that file. There are regulations I’m supposed to follow, and one of them says, no contracts of that classification to be shared with diviners without security clearance. Which you and I both know you don’t have.”

  Intuition snapped into place again. I was riding the sharp edge of my gift, putting together pieces without the help of tools. Maybe being a wilder had changed my divination after all. “Plausible deniability. Who gave this to you—the DEA or the CDC?” I dismissed the question as soon as I asked it. “Doesn’t matter. The entire federal government knows where I spend my days; they damn near put a tracker anklet on me. They knew I might be able to get a better read on this, but they also knew I don’t have a security clearance. So they gave it to you.” They might have even nudged him to increase the chance of him passing the file on to me.

  My boss was staring at me like I’d grown a second head. “Why? What in the name of all the gods would merit that kind of scheme?”

  The file was under my fingers. If I didn’t think it would set off a fire alarm, I would have taken my report out and burned it on the spot. “I’m pretty sure I can’t tell you. If they say it’s okay, then I will—I promise. But right now . . .” The words sounded ridiculous, but concerns like this had become a part of my daily life. “I think it’s a matter of public safety. And it might be urgent.”

  I wasn’t Julian. I hadn’t been raised the way he had, and didn’t have the corresponding habits. But Adam had dealt with wilders often enough that he knew not to look them in the eye, and he had been avoiding mine all this time. When I said “public safety,” though, he met my gaze.

  It wasn’t the first time somebody had done it. But I still hadn’t gotten used to the full-body shiver, the way people went rigid as if they were mice under the shadow of a hawk. Adam’s fingers tightened on the rims, and his pupils shrank to pinpricks. I looked away, wincing, and heard him draw in a ragged breath. Well, that was more dramatic than I meant it to be.

  “All right,” Adam said, and his voice was unsteady. “I’ll let them know. Can you, uh—can you wait out in the lobby?”

  I nodded and shut the door behind me as I went. The shields kept me from hearing even a murmur as Adam made the call, but after a few minutes, Mariko’s screen beeped. She’d been eyeing me warily since I came out. I had no idea what my expression looked like, but apparently it raised her curiosity. “Go on back in,” she said.

  He’d put an envelope on his desk, of a type I’d never seen before. When I picked it up, my fingers buzzed at the contact. Sigils marched down the seams, and a wax seal on the flap had a Seal of Solomon impressed into it, not yet affixed to the body of the envelope. “Write up your report,” Adam told me. “The whole
thing, not just what you’ve gotten so far this morning. When you’re done, put it in there, and fix the seal. Then give the envelope to Mariko. She’ll take care of it from there.”

  Document security. My training in ceremonial magic hadn’t gotten me far enough to recognize the sigils, but I was betting they were wards against scrying, fire, and various other hazards. “Should I put extra shields on the room while I work?” I asked.

  “Use the bunker.”

  Now it was my turn for my eyes to pop. The “bunker” was a room in the center of the office, shielded to hell and back again. Mostly they used it for the really complex and sensitive stuff, the things that involved not just divination but ceremonial rituals as well. Me, I’d never seen the inside of it. Interns were too low on the company ladder for that sort of thing.

  Apparently I wasn’t overreacting.

  I curled my fingers around the edges of the warded envelope. “What should I do with the materials during lunch?” Then, seeing Adam’s expression, I put up a hand to stop him from answering. “Never mind. Can I, um—” I was an intern, for the love of all the gods. I was supposed to be on the receiving end of what I was about to say, not the issuing end. “Is there any chance somebody could bring me back a sandwich?”

  Adam pushed a notepad and a pen toward me. “Write down what you want; somebody will take care of it. Just get that reading done.”

  Chapter Four

  Julian stopped on a quiet residential corner and cursed under his breath. He’d lost Neeya’s trail.

  She was supposed to be trying to lose him. That was her half of the exercise, just as tracking was his half. But the pride he might have felt at her success was tempered by annoyance at his own failure.

  Neeya was carrying a malfunctioning memory stone—or rather, one that had been designed to work wrong. It was leaking power, and he’d been following the traces ever since they left Toby’s house. Neeya was doing her best to erase them as she went, though, and somewhere between the previous corner and this one, she’d gotten the hang of it. He couldn’t find a hint of the thing anywhere.

  These practices had grown beyond the four of them, Julian and Neeya and Kim and Guan. Toby and Marcus were something of a social hub for Fiain in the D.C. area; when word got around that Kim and Julian were there almost every night, others started to show up. It was good to have other Fiain for company again, and being in their presence put Julian back into old habits of mind. When they ran exercises like this at the Center, the only way to truly fail was to give up.

  If this were an actual incident in the field, rather than merely an exercise, he’d be an idiot to quit pursuing his quarry just because he lost the trace. What other options did he have?

  He could search for Neeya psychically, but in this case that would be cheating. He knew her mind too well. The same went for trying to guess what path she might have taken, based on her usual habits. Most targets would be strangers to him, not people whose thinking he could predict in his sleep.

  That didn’t rule out logic, though. Julian thought about the neighborhood, what lay ahead if Neeya had gone right or left or had continued on straight. The lights of Kentucky Avenue were visible in the distance, and a fugitive with a leaking memory stone probably wouldn’t want to be surrounded by people. Left would take her back toward their starting point; would she avoid that, or choose it in the hope of shaking pursuit?

  “Are you going to stand there all night?”

  She’d gotten behind him faster than he expected. “Hello, Neeya.”

  A quiet laugh. She came up next to him and elbowed him lightly. “Lost my trail, huh?”

  “Trying to reason out which way you would have gone,” Julian admitted. “It’s still leaking.”

  “I know. I figured, if the exercise was over, I might as well save the effort.”

  Julian frowned down at her. “Your part of the exercise includes wiping its trail. You aren’t done until Guan takes it back or you can mop it up in your sleep.”

  Neeya wasn’t one to roll her eyes; habits like that could get you in trouble at the Center. She had a quirk of the mouth that served much the same purpose, though. “Fine talk from the guy who couldn’t follow me. What did they teach you at college, anyway?”

  By way of answer, Julian focused on the memory stone and wrapped it up in a shield, as neat as a bow.

  The humor went out of Neeya like a light switch turning off. “Right,” she said quietly. “Have you . . .”

  She didn’t finish the question, but she didn’t have to. “No,” Julian said. “The deep shield . . . it’s fundamentally different from other kinds of shielding. The woman who designed it was a genius; I’ll give her that. When it’s down, I can’t even find the structures it’s based on, they’re buried so deep. And when it’s up . . .”

  Another sentence that needed no finishing. When it was up, there was nothing he could do. A few years back, before he went to Welton, Julian had deliberately provoked the trainers into gutting him on three different occasions, so he could study the shield from the inside. All it had gotten him was a series of reprimands and the usual feeling of bone-deep loss.

  “What about that professor of yours?” Neeya asked. “Grayson. Would she know?”

  Julian removed the shield from the memory stone and took it from Neeya, studying its construction, both physical and magical. The exercise helped steady him. “The only people I can be sure know how the shield works are the ones who install it. But I don’t know if that’s written into the law somewhere, because everything to do with the shield is classified as a matter of national security. If anybody other than the doctors knows, then Grayson would be one of them. But I haven’t asked.”

  “Why not?” Neeya demanded. The light of a moment before might have gone off, but its absence revealed the embers burning in the dark. Most wilders learned to cope with the shield, one way or another. Julian supposed even he had learned to cope, if not as well as the others seemed to. Neeya was the only person he’d ever found who admitted hating it as much as he did. But just as there were fields where her gifts and aptitude trumped his, in this realm, they both knew Julian had the edge. If either of them was going to find a way to break the shield, it would be him.

  Which meant his failure cut all the more deeply. “Grayson knows I want to break it. She’s not an idiot. When a wilder enrolls in college and signs up for every shielding class they offer, she can guess what it means. If she wanted to help me, she would have told me by now.”

  “Then convince her.”

  Julian almost laughed. It would be like trying to persuade a stone to bend. “And risk her reporting me to someone? Besides, she isn’t the only one who can do the math. If she knew the secret and was likely to tell me, the DSPA would never have let me anywhere near her classes.”

  Neeya scowled, but any counter-argument she offered would have been simple petulance, and they both knew it. And she’d grown up since he went to Welton, because she didn’t indulge herself anyway. There was a time she would have argued until her voice gave out, just to have something to do.

  She took the memory stone back and began wiping its traces. “So what now?”

  He put one hand on her elbow, with gentle pressure. She nodded and began walking with him back to Toby and Marcus’ townhouse. “Maybe we break it the mundane way,” Julian said. “If we can win the case—get the Supreme Court to hear it and rule in Kim’s favor—or have the law changed to protect her, that’s a crack in their defenses. Hard to say we have to remain shielded, when she isn’t.”

  Neeya didn’t respond to that, but her control had never been the best. He could feel her suspicion. For her, the world had always been divided into Us and Them, and They were never to be trusted very far. Being out would cure her of that, he hoped. Fiain had to work with outside authorities in the course of their duties. He didn’t expect her to pin her hopes on Congress or the courts, but she might at least be persuaded to accept Kim.

  None of that was anything he
could say to her, though. Nor could he voice his other thought, because it was too distant of a possibility, and he didn’t want to get Neeya’s hopes up.

  The sidhe rarely worked magic in the ways humans did. For them it was instinctual, though they could and did train to develop certain abilities more fully. Still, there was every reason to think they could do what Julian could not: find the roots of the shield, and cut them out.

  If he could convince them to do it. If he could even talk to a sidhe again. That woman with her petition outside the Metro had been ridiculous, but her words had lodged under his skin and stuck there. Never mind letting the sidhe “come home” or being reunited with creatures that had been his cousins thousands of years ago. He needed their knowledge, their help.

  Julian was patient. If it took ten years for the balance between the worlds to be sorted out so that humans and sidhe could live together once more, he would wait.

  In the meanwhile, he would keep looking for the key.

  ~

  After three weeks of training with Guan, I felt like my brain was going to start leaking if I crammed one more psychic technique into it.

  I hadn’t mastered everything he’d thrown at me. That would take time and practice — more time and practice than I’d had so far. But Guan at least made sure I understood the principles, even if I couldn’t execute them correctly at speed, on my first try. I could guess at his reasoning: we had no idea how long we’d be able to continue with this setup. If he got pulled away, by his duties or somebody interfering, he wanted to leave me with as much as he could.

  It was a relief to have an evening partially off. Julian and Neeya had the basement to themselves tonight; he was teaching her some of the reflective shield techniques he’d gotten from Grayson, and it wasn’t safe for us to be in the room with them. Guan and I were upstairs in the living room, talking about the law.

  We weren’t alone. Toby was on duty that night, but Marcus wandered in and out, and he had other guests besides. Word had gotten around that Julian and I were at their townhouse most nights; one by one, it seemed like every wilder in D.C. was showing up to look me over. Some of them stayed to practice or to talk.