Silverblind (Ironskin)

by Tina Connolly

  “Here,” said Jack, tossing a sheaf of newspapers on her bed. “You might as well see this now.”

  The front page of the biggest city paper was a clear picture of Dorie-as-Dorian, looking on in maternal—well, paternal, perhaps—awe as the woglet swallowed, bright wings spread wide. Dorie groaned.

  “The good news is you’re not technically in trouble,” said Jack, plopping down next to Woglet. “The whole article went on about some new law that was passed on Monday making it illegal to own wyvern eggs. Wyverns themselves are not illegal. Yet. They asked one of the zookeepers to make an educated guess on how old your wyvern was, but the guy said he couldn’t say for sure whether it had hatched that night or a week ago. Also they didn’t know your name, although it was strongly hinted they were interested in finding out.”

  “I don’t even know,” said Dorie. She flipped to the continuation of the article to see if there were any more pictures, but there weren’t. “I guess Dorian’s kaput then. Time to invent a new persona,” she added glumly. She looked up at Jack’s expression. “Did we scoop your show?”

  “I can’t decide,” said Jack. “Would we have made the front page without you? Or would we have been buried under a police report file somewhere? The show’s only under investigation for now, but the sculptor who did the fey piece got booked under Subversive Activities. And you know what happens there—you never hear about the incident, or them, again.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” said Dorie. She laid a hand on Jack’s, but Jack dismissed it.

  “Don’t be. In a weird way I envy him. He had something worth fighting for, you know?”

  “I suppose,” said Dorie. A brief article below hers caught her eye—NURSES’ STRIKE TURNS UGLY. A grainy picture showed one of the women struggling against a policeman in riot gear. They had framed the shot well—the woman looked violent, insane. She peered at it, hoping it was not her stepmother.

  Jack thrust a scrap of paper into her view. “We’re not done here,” she said.

  “And…? What’s the rest of it?”

  “The Queen’s Lab called,” Jack said. “It was strongly suggested that you be there by nine.”

  “And the time is?”

  “Eight forty-five,” said Jack. She put her hands up. “Don’t look at me—the landlady literally just brought the message up.”

  Dorie put her head in her hands and groaned. Woglet ululated happily in response.

  * * *

  The Queen’s Lab was a five-minute walk from their flat. Dorie managed to change into Dorian and get out the door by nine-oh-five, which she thought was doing pretty well as Jack had insisted she clean up the remnants of the mice Woglet had left the night before. Jack was not particularly squeamish, but she said it was the principle of the thing, and she didn’t make Dorie clean up after her models. Dorie said when the models started eating bits of mice they’d talk, and with one thing and another they both were rather grouchy by the time Dorian Eliot slipped out the fire escape and up onto the roof, and leapt the half-meter between the sheltering sycamores to the arts building, which was her preferred method of avoiding their landlady. Artists could always be counted on to leave the roof door open, and she sauntered down the stairs and out of the building.

  At the base of the arts building, she let Woglet chase a vole while she nibbled on a clump of sorrel growing in the shade. Someone had left a half-eaten apple by a sketchpad, and she filched the apple and hurried Woglet along from his vole bits before the artist could return.

  More than one student stopped them on their walk to see the woglet live and in person. Several wanted to pet him, and Dorie-as-Dorian let them, wondering how Woglet would react. It was different every time—a small boy he let stroke his head, and a large professor he stood up and tried unsuccessfully to hypnotize. Once he snapped, and that person snapped at Dorie for letting her pet him, and Dorie shrugged.

  At nine-twenty she strolled into the lobby of the Queen’s Lab, outwardly serene, but truthfully with her heart in her mouth. Woglet was asleep again, digesting the morning’s activities with a wobbly snore. The gatekeeper pressed his silver-sigiled palm onto hers with a yawn, then waved her through. He had done that on Monday, but she had not known the significance then. She walked through the steel door he opened, glad once again that what was poison to true fey was not always so to her. She didn’t particularly like being in close contact with iron for very long, but it wasn’t deadly. And now the wyvern goo—although she was not eager to try touching it in fey form, it seemed to not poison her as long as she was in human shape.

  Everyone who happened to be walking through the area looked around when she came in. Some of them managed to go back to their missions, but a couple of scientists stopped and stared openly. She always cataloged them, automatically. Like Jack’s artists’ collective, the lab was highly gendered. It wasn’t just the field work position—there weren’t many women here, period. Still, the self-assured girl from the forest must be here somewhere.

  Simons came hurriedly up to her, still looking rumpled and overworked, but decidedly more deferential to Dorian than he had been to Dorie.

  To be fair, Dorian did have a woglet.

  “Right this way, sir,” he said. “Our lab director is very eager to meet you.”

  Dorie lingered, enjoying the sudden shift in power. “You know, I’d really love to see your wyvern facilities first, Mr., uh…”

  “Simons. Are you sure that’s the best idea? Wyverns are notoriously cranky, even with each other.”

  Dorie strode forward, strong and easy, toward where she remembered the lab was. She could get used to this. “Is it down this way, Simons?”

  He hurried after her, trying to keep up. “Yes, but I’m sure the director will want to show you personally.…”

  “Oh, but I’ll want to make sure the facilities are adequate for the work I’m interested in doing.”

  Simons spluttered. “Adequate? This is the Queen’s Lab—”

  She was on the edge of gaining her goal when a commanding voice stopped them in their tracks. “That’s enough, Simons,” said a mellifluous voice. “I’ll take it from here.” Dr. Pearce clapped Dorie on the shoulder and steered her down the hall to his office. He gestured for her to take a seat, but she decided Dorian would rather stand than sit in that low chair next to his massive desk. She strolled over to the terrarium, forcing Dr. Pearce to tag along if he wanted to talk to her. The adolescent wyvern was back in the cage—but sometime in the last two days the little copper bolt had been replaced by an iron padlock.

  “What do you think, Woglet?” she asked the purring silver ball in the crook of her arm. He stood on her elbow, poking his nose up with curiosity. The wyvern inside the cage fanned its wings dramatically and opened and shut its mirrored eyelids—display gestures of aggression. Woglet tried to fan his wings, too, and dug his claws into her arm as he overbalanced. She pried the claws off as she turned away from the cage.

  “The question in all our minds, Mr.…”

  “Eliot,” she supplied.

  “Eliot,” Dr. Pearce filled in smoothly, while watching the wyvern display with a great deal of interest. “How on earth did you tame him? I’m pretty sure it’s a him, by the way, though wyverns are hard to sex. You can just tell he’s a fighter.”

  Dorie, who was sure Woglet was male, decided in that moment to refer to him as female as long as she was around Dr. Pearce.

  She had in fact been turning the matter of Woglet’s docility over, and she had come to the obvious conclusion that it must have been the time the egg spent in her belly that did it. The belly plus her fey side? Simply the belly? No way of separating the two for a proper study, regardless, and certainly no way of disclosing how it had been done. Dorie settled on saying, a bit pointedly, “Perhaps it was because she knew she had no parents or nest to return to.”

  Dr. Pearce shook his head and said, “Unfortunately, there have been other wyvern chicks found in that sad state. May I?”

  Do
rie tilted her elbow up, interested to see what Woglet would do—bite, hypnotize, or purr. He flapped his silver wings and began the shrill yodel that meant displeasure. Dr. Pearce put his hand out regardless, and as he did, she noticed the silver sigil marking his palm. It glowed brighter as it approached Dorie and Woglet. Woglet’s yodel dropped an octave and took on a purry rumble. He actually let that man stroke his head. Dorie was taken aback.

  Dr. Pearce saw her face and smiled. “He recognizes his womb,” he said, showing her the sigil.

  Dorie swallowed at this confirmation of what they were doing with the wyvern albumen. “I thought just the silvermen had those,” she said.

  “Silvermen first,” he agreed. “First we protect those at most risk—policemen, scientists. Then those who can afford to pay the large initial investment fees—we need to support the cause somehow! But eventually, everybody. We’ll be free of the fey menace for good.”

  “I thought iron did that,” said Dorie.

  “Better than iron,” said Dr. Pearce. “Wyvern albumen, if you haven’t heard, is actively poisonous to fey. Next best thing to the legendary basilisk eggs. With the sigil in your hand you cannot be taken over. Never.”

  “Well, that sounds just dandy,” managed Dorie.

  He studied his palm. “We’ve found that they glow around fey, but it’s not as useful as we hoped, as they have a pretty sensitive threshold and glow around a number of other, non-fey things. Like your little friend here.” He rubbed Woglet’s head, who was cooing. “It’s an area we’re still studying.” He stood. “But enough about that. Let’s take a tour of the facilities, shall we?”

  Under his personal escort she saw several labs stocked with what he assured her was the very latest equipment, and then a well-stocked storeroom full of things like hartbird feathers and vials labeled DANGER—HYDRA VENOM, and then he handed her off to a clump of researchers to poke around the wyvern hatching facilities while Woglet chased field mice from the lab’s stores. She knew there was plenty more proprietary stuff she wasn’t being shown, yet even this was so fascinating that she was still caught up in it at lunchtime when he popped his head back in and declared he was sending her out to lunch on the lab’s expense.

  “Along with the two field scientists you met yesterday,” Dr. Pearce said, “since you’ve already met, and they’re a couple of our best and brightest. Tam and Annika?” Tam loped over to meet them. Annika wore a tight-lipped smile on her athletic face. “Counting on you to woo Dorian,” he said. “Tam is our golden boy here, the one who discovered the secret of the wyvern eggs—and no one can resist Annika’s charms. Half the lab is smitten with her and the other half just doesn’t know it yet.” The young woman’s forced smile did not change and Dorie had a stabbing flash of what it would have been like if she had accepted that liaison job here, as Dorie.

  Dr. Pearce steered them out the front door, and Dorie was impressed at the sheer amount of force he displayed, while being only straight human. His attitude to her was different as a boy, and certainly better, but he was clearly the alpha male of the lab, in charge of everybody, boy or girl.

  She and Tam and Annika found themselves out in the bright sunlight, blinking and at a loss for words. The cool lights of the facility had been giving her a headache, she now realized. Woglet emitted a pleased yodel at the sun.

  “Well,” said Tam finally. “There’s the University cafeteria, but I doubt anyone wants boiled potatoes when Old Pearcey has deigned to comp us a meal.”

  “I would not eat there on a bet,” said Annika.

  “Noted,” said Tam. “What about the Queen’s Arms? It’s close.”

  “No women allowed,” said Dorie and Annika together, and Annika shot her an odd look.

  “Ah, right,” said Tam, a bit sheepishly. “You usually work through lunch, Annika.”

  “There are reasons for that,” said Annika tightly. But she softened and said, “What about The Wet Pig?” and so they went there.

  Dorie had just been there as Dorian to find Colin, but then she had been distracted. Now she looked at it with a fresh eye.

  The Wet Pig catered to students, particularly the free-spirited, breaking-boundaries sort of students, and women were everywhere in here, sitting around drinking ale with the men in cheerful, casual fashion. Dorie knew the place well, as it was one of the few places she enjoyed going while female, which made it extra odd to be going here as Dorian. It was also a perennial artists’ hangout—a favorite of Jack and her gang. The old plaster walls had long since been covered over in several layers of murals from successive art students, the good ones left by common accord and the poor ones rapidly painted over. At this point it was practically a who’s who of the artists who had passed through the nearby art institute. There was even one by Jack, and it was in fact of Dorie, head thrown back in a riot of laughing curls, pounding a table with a mug of beer. She sat down with her back to it.

  It occurred to her that Colin might be working today, and she hoped he would have the sense not to say anything to her if so. She thought she had impressed upon him the need for caution, but …

  Woglet jumped off her shoulder onto the wooden table, where the other two scientists looked at him with frank curiosity and seemed not to particularly care that there was a lizard near their food. She warmed to Annika a smidgen for that. Scientists were restful.

  Dorie took the opportunity to order everything she had ever wanted off the menu—smoked trout, a plate of thick-cut fried potatoes, roasted plums, a pint of dark stout. Usually she stuck to the cheapest fare: bread and cheese and whatever ale was the house special. Tam and Annika, she was pleased to see, ordered food and drink in equal quantities, and the waitress looked glad to have someone besides penniless students to wait on for a change.

  “So how did you get your job at the lab?” Dorie asked Annika, because it was the question burning on her tongue. “You must be one of the only women there.”

  “One of four,” Annika said. “The only one out in the field.”

  Tam was holding out his fingers for Woglet to sniff. Woglet looked dubious. “Even Pearcey can manage to hire a girl when she’s twice as good as everybody else.” Dorie stiffened in response.

  Annika brushed this off. She leaned into Dorie. “Not twice as good,” she said intensely. “Twice as driven, perhaps. I wanted to continue working abroad with Thomas, post-University. But the fey are only here in this country. Thomas had to return home to continue his research.” She spread fingers. “And here we are.”

  “You went to school abroad?” said Dorie to Tam. She had thought Tam had gone to University down in the south country somewhere—though he had had the marks to go to one of the top schools here in the city. Aunt Helen had been bemused but accepting.

  Tam shook his head, and named a second-tier but respectable country school. “I followed my research,” he said. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing a neat bandage over the wyvern burns from the day before. “I needed access to the woods and small towns to write my book. And the sort of school where I could skive off for a week to chase a lead. A wild goose chase took me abroad, to Annika’s school for a term. But I don’t regret it.” He looked away, apparently busy pulling his journal from his vest, but Dorie knew him well enough to see the hint of a smile that lightened his features. It stabbed her heart.

  “I grew up here,” put in Annika. “But for school, I wanted to see my mother’s country. My colleagues thought I was crazy to leave the job offers I was getting there after University, ja? But you have the wyverns. You have the fey. And, you have Thomas.” There was an unspoken “most of all” in that sentence. “His book was still in draft form then. I knew what he had found could change the world, if we got it into the right hands.”

  “Well,” said Tam, demurring. He flattened his journal and began making notes, eyes on the baby wyvern.

  “He is too modest,” interrupted Annika. “He had what amounts to a history degree. Crypto-zoology? Who knows, who cares. I have the science
background and as a woman, I will tell you I am used to being overlooked. Therefore I could see what others were overlooking here.”

  “The childish ravings of a lizard-loving lunatic,” murmured Tam with amusement, apparently quoting someone. “I think that should go on the back of my book.” He was more interested in rubbing salt on his fingers and holding them out to Woglet. Woglet licked the tips of Tam’s fingers and purred. Tam made a note.

  “At the time, I was working with a small team on that tranq formula you saw in action,” Annika continued. “I brought Thomas and his book and the serum to Dr. Pearce, and made Dr. Pearce an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Her eyes narrowed. “And I don’t mean what you’re thinking.”

  “What then?” said Dorie. The waitress set their drinks down on the heavy wooden table, barely sparing a glance for the winged lizard. Another good thing about the Pig—standards were clearly so bohemian that they didn’t care if their patrons had pets.

  Annika nodded her thanks as she tried her drink. “Nice to be back home to a fine brown ale,” she said.

  “Although those cold lagers would be nice on a day like today,” put in Tam.

  “True.”

  “Annika, what did you do?” said Dorie. “How did Dr. Pearce let you in?”

  Annika leaned back in her chair with her ale, studying Dorian. “I brought him proof,” she said finally. “None of your little dolled-up girl scientists with their treasured letters of recommendation, tiptoeing in like a supplicant, expecting to be thrown out.” Annika took a long swallow as Dorie sat on her hands and suppressed her temper. “I brought him a live northern vampire bat that I had defanged myself. And I brought him a sample of the tranquilizing serum you saw in action. Perhaps he could pass up the vampire bat. But only I hold the key to the tranqs. You have not invented anything like that here. We are not releasing the formula. I hold the upper hand.” She shrugged her broad shoulders. “And that is all you need to do if you are a girl.”

  “I see,” said Dorie. There was an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps the things she had always done to keep her fey side from being noticed, to keep herself from being noticed and commented on, had played right in to her submissive role in the interviews. What part of her was Dorie-hiding-fey, and what part of her was playing into the part that society had handed her? Perhaps if she had gone in two days ago as she had gone in today—with a wyvern chick, walking as though she owned the place.… The character of the person who hid, who tried to work behind the scenes, who retaliated not openly but through spilt teacups … that was not the character of this girl across from her. And where was the root of that? “Most women I meet aren’t quite so sure of themselves,” Dorie said slowly. It was a question, not a barb.