Silverblind (Ironskin)

by Tina Connolly

  The gallery attendant looked down at the slight man hoping to squeeze under her arm and her eyes widened. She drew back from Dorie—took a step back, even. Her face was a peculiar mixture of salacious excitement and fear. “Go right on in,” she said.

  Dorie was puzzled but she seized the chance. She pressed her way in, Tam following behind.

  There was a painting just in front of the entrance, the first one you were meant to see, and Dorie stepped carefully through the crowd, peering around shoulders and hats. Was it the fey piece again—people coming to see for themselves what had been alluded to in the newspaper?

  But no, she did not see that sculpture’s blue light anywhere. The painting in front of her that held pride of place was a true painting, a real painting, and it was by Jack.

  It was the painting of Stella, the one Dorie had seen Jack working on the last week. But it had changed. Jack was doing something new.

  It was a new style. Jack had had barely any time to put her three new paintings for the exhibit together, and that was obvious to Dorie in the mere fact that it was of necessity a departure from Jack’s regular, labor-intensive work. But there was not a lack in the paintings themselves. It was a mix of Jack’s most gorgeous painterly qualities: the beautifully realized lines, the transparent colors. But they were sparsely used, and were combined with Jack’s other side, her cartooning, caricatured, grotesquely exaggerated sketches. The two combined to make not only a painting style infused with energy, but a treatment of subject that was entirely new to Jack’s work.

  The tiny dwarvven girl was in the big armchair. But Jack had exaggerated Stella’s small size; she had exaggerated the armchair’s bulk. That offhand comment of Dorie’s was here, writ large. Around Stella you saw a world that was not meant to suit her—a world designed for anyone but her. Simple everyday items were placed in such a way that you saw how she had to adapt, all day long. The real Stella never complained. But to Dorie, it hit home for the first time how hard it must be for her friend. In life Stella had been simply asleep—here the sleeping posture showed her to be wrung out with exhaustion.

  It captured—not just Stella, but her place in the world.

  Without noticing it, Dorie had moved closer to the painting, fingers stretched out as if to touch her friend. Without noticing it, the space around her had cleared for her.

  She turned now, and all around she saw faces shot through with expressions similar to the gallery attendant: shock, excitement, fear. The crowds parted from her on either side; a long hallway of empty space opened up and she walked down it, heart beating more and more wildly.

  There was a painting at the end of her walk.

  A tall, wide painting, the biggest one in the collection.

  Snatches of conversation met her ears before the speakers saw her and stopped. “It’s this Jacqueline girl that’s the real deal.” “A start of a new movement.” “Will be imitated for years to come.” And then, “Do you think it’s really true?” followed by the sharp hiss, the drawn-out breath, “Loooook, it’s him … her…”

  The painting was of Dorie. Of Dorian. Of something peculiar and abnormal and fey. It was both sides of her, fractured down the middle, pulling each other apart. Dorie on one side, with her blond ringlets and downcast eyes. Dorian on the other, with his bent nose and wry grin, Woglet perched on his shoulder. As the figures were pulled apart they were revealed to be hollow.

  In between blue smoke rose up.

  It was obvious that even if people wouldn’t have immediately recognized her face as the young man in the drawing, there was only one person in town with a pet wyvern, and she/he was here tonight.

  Dorie backed away, Woglet yodeling and flapping his wings for balance at her abrupt motion. The sense of betrayal mingled with something else, something peculiar. Relief, it felt like. She refused to feel it. Betrayal, that’s what Jack had done.

  There were silvermen moving through the crowds as she backed up. One more painting caught her eye—a painting of Jack, the size and shape of a mirror.

  Jack had not spared herself.

  It was an oval picture of Jack in paint-splattered cigarette pants and bangles, kissing a girl who was not Stella. Jack’s eyes were not on the girl; they were looking back out at the viewer. Daring them? Or just, steady. Frank. One hand held a paintbrush, and it was coming toward you, the hand and brush wild and all out of proportion, devolving into a brush-stroked sketch. It was sweeping the fourth wall away, coming for you, going for the next painting, the next truth.

  And there was Jack herself in the crowd, and her eyes met Dorie’s as if to say, I’m sorry, and Dorie could not feel any anger toward her best friend, but still, the silvermen were coming, and Stella was in jail; her parents were in jail, Aunt Helen and Uncle Rook had fled—

  They were on her then, and Dorie tried to run, but she could not wriggle free. She tried to fade, but she could not become unnoticed. She could not turn over some trash bins to slow them down, she could not blind them with blue light. She was well and truly caught, and she could never disappear again.

  * * *

  Dr. Pearce was the first to come visit her in jail. No, not jail, what was the Crown’s preferred term for their fancy new security building? To be fair, her room had a nice bed and a shiny desk and a terrible painting of flowers and looked more like a hotel room than a dungeon. They had not reached the building till late last night, and so she had had a good night’s sleep for a change. She should have been too worried to sleep, but it turned out she was too exhausted to worry. This morning, a man escorted her to the restroom and back, and now it was breakfast time in her nice not-jail. She could see blue skies and clear sunlight and the Queen’s Lab through the narrow window. But Woglet was missing, the door was locked, and there was some of that new one-way glass all along one wall. The blue tint of fey light was everywhere. Jail would do.

  If she had known Dr. Pearce was supposed to be the good cop, she might have been more cooperative. Or not. He got her back up at the best of times and this was not that.

  After pretending to be impressed with her double interviews as Dorie/Dorian—but actually needling her in a supercilious way—he moved on to other areas of persuasion, appealing to her sense of justice, which he mistook for a sense of duty to her country.

  “Now certainly, the fey energy won’t work outside the country,” he was saying. “But it’ll transform our country into something great again. If we can lick the energy problem here, we’ll be much stronger. And think about your beloved poor. This would clear up their pollution, their smog. Clean air. Clean living. Fewer poor in the hospitals with lung problems, or overworked from the factories—fey energy can take their place. People will be free to innovate.”

  “And it’s only at the cost of subjugating an entire race,” filled in Dorie.

  Dr. Pearce scoffed. “Come, now. Don’t be so dramatic. They’re not even really people.”

  “Decimating another species—I suppose once the fey are all subdued, you won’t ever need wyverns again. Might as well be gone.”

  “Whatever you might think of us, we did not commit that particular atrocity,” said Dr. Pearce tightly. “More likely it was one of Malcolm Stilby’s goons, tracking you up to the forest.” He rose and said, “Perhaps you’ll like Annika’s line of questioning better.” The malice in his tone suggested she emphatically would not. At the door he turned and said, “Oh, and I’m curious, Miss Adora. Show me how you switch from boy to girl.” There was something so salacious in his eyes that it gave her real pleasure to laugh in his face and show off the palm of her hand.

  “You stopped me from changing back,” she said. “Sucks to be you.”

  After that, there was quiet for a time. She wondered if her parents had ever been released, or if they were going to be brought in as bait. She wondered what had happened to Stella, and if they had managed to supply her with something comfortable to sit on, or given her the standard-issue human-sized rooms. She wondered if she should be mad
at Jack, who had refused to compromise her artistic integrity to keep her out of jail. Hadn’t Dorie refused to sell an egg to pay back Jack, pay back the rent she owed? She wondered which was worse. The silvermen would have caught up with her eventually. She wondered about Woglet. She wondered about Tam.

  The door buzzed and Annika came in with lunch. She sat down in a chair and looked calmly at Dorie with her mismatched eyes while Dorie ate.

  Dorie refused to be unnerved. When your week had been mostly subsisting on dandelions you ate your soup and bread and enjoyed it, no matter how many basilisk stares you got. “You knew, didn’t you?” said Dorie. “After you put the basilisk in your eye. You knew I was part-fey.”

  “I couldn’t be sure,” said Annika. “But I had very strong suspicions.” She flipped a page over in the notebook she always carried. “I was hoping to examine you myself. Before turning you in, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Dorie. “Another chapter for your book. I suppose you’d like to have a matched set with Tam. Collected Fey Tales at one end, Collected Half-Fey Tales at the other, and husband Tam serving champagne at your cocktail parties. Full of the most blindly nationalistic people, of course, the ones who say ‘praise the Crown’ every other sentence and mean it.”

  Annika was unflappable. “Don’t worry about my book. The research I gather today will be more than adequate. Besides, the Crown comes first.” She narrowed her eyes at Dorie, considering. “I know that with this eye I have full control over true fey. What I want to know is, how far does that extend with you?” She opened her silver eye and stared down at Dorie. “Move your right hand,” she said.

  There was a small tugging feeling. But it seemed to be blocked, somehow. Her hand did not move.

  Annika’s shoulders slumped a fraction even as her eyebrows knitted together. “I don’t believe that it has no effect,” she said. “Merely, I have not mastered the application.” She tried again, but still nothing. This time she got up and paced, thinking. “I don’t mind telling you that this does not meet my hypothesis,” she said. “My hypothesis was that it would work on you halfway—sluggishly. The fey in you should still react to my command.”

  Dorie shrugged and went back to her soup. “Iron doesn’t work on me, either,” she said. Which wasn’t quite true—it did, ever so slowly, wear her down, make her sluggish.

  “That’s right,” mused Annika. “There are things that can interfere with the process.” She whirled, looking at the one-way mirror, then back at Dorie. “Your hand,” she said. “You told Dr. Pearce the wyvern in your hand stops you changing. I wonder if it interferes with the basilisk eye.”

  Dammit, why had she given Pearce any information? His nastiness had gotten the best of her after all.

  “Beats me,” said Dorie, but Annika was already at the door, calling through the peephole for iron, copper, and more wyvern albumen.

  Annika tried a number of things while Dorie got more and more furious and was unable to do anything about it except plan what she would do if something worked. The door was locked with those fancy buzzing locks they had at the Queen’s Lab, but the medallion she had seen used by the silverman in charge was a different size and shape than the ones used at the Queen’s Lab. They had not given Annika a medallion, so Dorie could not try to steal it. They were locked in here together. But there was a narrow window, if she could break through it. Maybe with that trash bin there. She was almost slight enough to fit through, and she could fuzz out a bit around the broken edges. What was this, the eighth floor? She could always go half-fey as she fell.

  If something worked.

  Around teatime, Annika decided the only recourse was to try to take the wyvern tattoo out of Dorie’s palm. After consultation with the other room she came back with a handful of steel wool and an iron file. “Please understand this is purely scientific,” she said to Dorie, and carefully she scraped away at the reddened palm, obliterating the silver eye.

  The scraping seared and burned as her tender skin sloughed away. Blood welled up and dripped on their nice desk. She thought she might faint. But she could feel her power slowly wriggle free. Tam had been right. She didn’t need all the wyvern out, just enough. She whimpered wholeheartedly about the pain and concealed her excitement. Annika stopped regularly to see if the treatment was working. Finally, about halfway through, as Annika leveled her silver eye to focus on her, Dorie closed her eyes and swung for Annika’s jaw.

  It was not a brilliant punch, but her right hand did connect, and then she was running for the window, eyes closed and fey senses extended.

  They caught her after she broke the window but before she could wriggle through. They gave her a rag for her hand and silvermen peeled her eyelids back with tape and then finally, Annika was able to say, raise your right hand and have Dorie obey.

  Annika walked Dorie around the room, testing the motions and scribbling in her notebook. Finally Annika sat Dorie in a chair and got to the deeper purpose in her role working for the government.

  “What was your purpose with the wyvern eggs?” she asked, and Dorie, to her horror, found herself answering. “Very good,” said Annika. She called in a secretary to take notes as Dorie went through all the details of her work with the ironskin. Annika was thorough and the questioning went on and on and on. Once Dorie tried to use her partial fey power to manipulate Annika, but Annika threatened her with iron handcuffs and she was unlikely to ever break free of those, so she stopped. Her left hand throbbed. She fuzzed the edges of it blue to keep the pain manageable, so she could think.

  Dorie tried to elide the fact that Tam had helped her, to keep him from getting into trouble. It was working pretty well—and then it dawned on her that Annika was intentionally helping her, never asking questions that would reveal Tam specifically. She hated to collude with Annika, but there was really no choice. They knew she had worked with another boy—she shifted the blame to poor Colin.

  Still, what of it. The ironskin were done—except for the ones they had taken into custody. Dorie and Tam had done all they could do, and if the silvermen wanted to hear the details, there was not much that would hurt the former ironskin now. She answered as carefully as she could while trying to see what she could do to manipulate the wyvern in her abraded hand to act as a stopgap. She was in the unusual position of now wanting the wyvern goo to succeed. Annika’s gaze could keep her from moving physically, but there was still stuff Dorie could do inside.

  That’s when Annika shifted into grilling Dorie about their work in the forests.

  “You know all this,” said Dorie. “You were there.” Annika ignored this. “And why do you care anyway? You’ve got your machine to trap the fey.”

  Annika looked levelly at her. “Because all the fey left in the country will not be enough to supply all the energy we will need. And Thomas said that you had a theory that you could reach other worlds, with more fey.”

  “Tam? What do you mean, he told you?”

  Annika smiled the smile of the girl who knew she’d won. “You don’t think our little spat in the clearing meant anything, do you? Thomas Grimsby is, and has always been, the eyes for the Crown. We were pleased when he got you to trust him so easily.”

  It was a blow to the gut. Annika couldn’t possibly be right—could she? Was this his revenge—his own betrayal? Was this the good fight he had told Aunt Helen he had found?

  Calm and confident in her success, Annika pressed on, asking more questions about the circle the basilisk had come through, probing Dorie to find out exactly what her take on it was.

  Dorie omitted, evaded, threw out sullen answers and sarcastic jests as much as she could. Dinner came and went and she was now too angry and upset to eat it. It sat and cooled until they finally took it away again.

  Tam came in partway through this exercise and began pointing out when she was evading the truth. Annika beamed at him; Dorie felt a profound misery all over at this confirmation. She shot him one angry look, and then started answering in the other
languages she had picked up a smattering of in prep school, stopping when she found one Annika clearly didn’t know.

  Finally, an irritated Annika called in one of the silvermen and commanded him, “Bring in her parents.” There was another wait while the man went to obey. Pain and fear alternating with boredom—what a wretched combination. It was growing dark outside. How long would she be in here? Would they keep her day after day, until they wore her down? Of course, if they started in on her parents, she didn’t think she would last very long at all. Jane would exhort her to try, but she would crumple.

  Finally the man buzzed open the door and crept back in, looking worried. “They were released after forty-eight hours in detention,” he said. “An administrative error.”

  “Fools,” said Annika. She glared at the man as if wishing her silver eye could affect humans as well.

  “She has another friend in custody,” said Tam. “Her name is Stella—not sure of the last name, but she’s dwarvven. Brought in last night. I called over and had her transferred to this building this afternoon.”

  Dorie glared at him.

  “Excellent,” said Annika. She smiled approvingly at Tam. “You were right about removing the tattoo, by the way. That was key.” He gripped her shoulder affectionately.

  “May you burn in a furnace,” Dorie spat. “May you choke on a thousand bug guts. May a copperhead hydra bite your fingers off.”

  “Easy,” said Annika. She was too self-contained to smirk, but Dorie could see it lurking behind the veneer. She stretched and said to Dorie pleasantly, “I’ll let you think about whether we should call Stella in while I go freshen up. Now, I’d like you to tell Thomas everything you can about this ‘way through’ that you were traitorously planning to send our energy source through.”