Chains and Memory (24 page)

The prospect made me shiver. Ghosts, imps, some adolescent mid-manifestation on astral walkabout . . . none of the possibilities were good.

There was only one place we could go without attracting attention from my watchdog. I'd been avoiding it since I got on the Metro that disastrous morning, but I had a justification for being there. And if we played our cards right, we could buy ourselves some time in the bunker.

FAR's office building looked different as Julian and I approached. Nothing had changed; the windows were as clean and bright as ever, the ground floor lobby dominated by the same piece of bland public sculpture as before, a curving, abstract piece. The elevator smelled the same, faintly redolent of the pine-scented cleaning fluid the janitors mopped it with every night. Mariko was behind her desk as usual.

It wasn't the place that had changed. It was me.

Mariko was on her feet before I even reached for the door handle, coming around her desk so fast she caught her thigh against the corner. I winced; that would leave a bruise. She didn't seem to care. “Kim! Oh my goodness, we weren't sure if we would ever see you again!”

“Hi, Mariko,” I said, managing a decent excuse for a smile. “I'm, um. Not really back yet. I need to talk to Adam about that, and I figured, I should at least come by and say hello.”

“Oh, of course!” She leaned over her desk and hit a button, which would turn on a discreet light in the various rooms. That way anybody in the middle of a divination or other piece of magical work wouldn't have their work disturbed.

But people must have been in between tasks, because it was only a few seconds before doors started opening, heads popping out. Within moments I was surrounded, Julian retreating to a quiet spot in the corner. Most of the people here had seen him at one point or another, and a lot of them had been introduced, but I was the one being welcomed home.

Home.
My throat closed up without warning, tears pricking my eyes. I hadn't expected this kind of warmth and support, and it was shaking my composure.
Not yet. Not yet.

Then Latonya stepped out of the way and Adam rolled his chair forward. “Kim,” he said, holding out his hand. Surprised, I took it in my own; he held on longer than mere politeness required. His grip was strong and warm, and a clear signal that whatever had happened, I still had a place here. “Gods, it's good to see you. There's been a lot of stuff on the news lately, reports about wilders—about that whole arrangement. I never realized how serious your situation was.”

I needed to talk to the reporters, keep the momentum going. It might do some good, if I leveraged the attention. “What kinds of things are they saying?”

“This deep shield business,” Adam said. “There's an investigative reporter—”

I was supposed to be here to talk about the rest of my internship, the plans for me to go into training once the shield was down, which would keep me too busy to work at FAR for a while. It was a necessary bit of practicality, and made a good pretext for me to pay a visit to FAR, with Julian to keep me company. The next part was supposed to happen
after
that.

But my breath caught in my throat, my gut twisting in that too-familiar way, and I realized I would never have a better excuse than now.

A small sound escaped me, a sound I would have normally tried to suppress. It was a little gasp, cut off. Adam stopped, brows knitting in concern. “Kim?”

I waved one hand, pressing the other against my stomach. “I'm sorry. It's just—” In my peripheral vision, I saw Julian rise from his chair. He couldn't nudge me, not without anybody noticing, but he didn't have to.

All I had to do was think about the shield. Not in a cold, rational way, trying to think of a method for cutting it out; not in hot anger, visualizing it as an enemy I could kill. An inexorable weight, pressing down on me, crushing the life from my spirit. Tears were spilling from my eyes. Every breath was a gasp, little sips of air that couldn't fill my lungs. There were arms around me, a hand pressing gently on the small of my back, guiding my stumbling feet. I knew without asking that it was Julian. I didn't lift my head to see where we were going; I just let him lead me, and then a door closed behind us and he said, “Kim. Can you pull yourself together?”

When I dashed the tears away and looked around, I found we were right where we had planned: in the heavily-warded bunker at the center of FAR's offices.

I'd been in here last month, when Adam sent me to finish the fairy dust divination. It was a good place to take an emotionally fragile wilder — especially if the people there didn't know what exactly the deep shield did and did not do — and it would keep us safe while Julian “comforted” me after my staged breakdown.

How long we would have was anybody's guess. Julian had convinced Adam to leave us alone, but sooner or later somebody would knock on the door and ask if I was okay.

My body was still shuddering. The problem with staging a breakdown was, it had become entirely real. “Help me,” I said through my teeth.

Julian knew what I meant. “Are you sure?” At my nod, he went to work doing exactly what I had cursed at him not to do just a few days before. I couldn't feel the empathic contact, but my distress vanished as if it had never been, leaving me with nothing but burning eyes and an accelerated heart rate to tell me I had ever been crying.

I sat down on the floor and opened my bag. This room was like the ritual spaces at Welton, an empty box with a copper ring in the floor. No cabinets of supplies or anything else, because the people who worked here brought their own. I imagined their supplies generally didn't include coils of rope, nor plastic bags of illegal drugs.

Julian was presumably busy dismantling my outer shields — both the ones he placed on me after the surgery, and the ones that were part of the deep shield itself. While he did that, I tied my feet together and prepared the dust. I felt like a coke fiend, pouring it onto a pocket mirror and scraping it into a neat line for easy inhalation.

Then Julian was kneeling, using more of the rope to bind my arms to my sides. We didn't know if I was going to thrash around, but figured it was better to be safe than sorry. And if we got caught mid-effort, me being trussed up like a hog wasn't going to make it look any worse.

He didn't ask if I was ready. We were long past that point. Instead he held up the mirror and a short length of straw. I took one deep breath to steady myself, let it out—and then inhaled the powder.

~

Julian was ready to catch Kim if she fell backward. She'd described the feeling of the drug to him before, even shared the memory with him; that kind of burning pain could make her convulse. But she only coughed briefly, swallowed, and then looked up at him.

“I don't feel anything,” she said.

They'd administered it correctly. Both times Kim got hit with the dust, she had inhaled it. But that only held true if what Neeya had given them was indeed the same drug. Julian had never seen the stuff before, and Kim never had a chance to study it. They'd trusted that what Neeya had stolen had been the real thing, not a decoy or a different chemical.

Kim said, “It acted fast before. Pretty much instantaneously. I don't think it's doing anything.” Her voice was tight with worry.

All the breath left Julian in a rush. “Don't worry. It is.”

He could feel it when he reached out, flowering through her like a firework.
Gods above,
Julian thought in awe, watching the effect spread and build.
I hope we didn't give her too much.
It was a quiescent fire, a paradox: enormous power, energy for the taking, and yet just lying there inert. He'd been prepared for her gifts to spin out of control, but there was no chance of that. They couldn't act without Kim's direction, and she had no ability to stir them even to the slightest degree.

Absurdly, he found himself laughing. “You're glowing.”

Kim looked down at herself, but of course she couldn't see it. Then she shook her head and shifted in his hands. “Lay me down. Let's do this, before we lose our chance.”

She was right. Julian lowered her to the floor, then settled himself cross-legged alongside. The dust was doing as he had hoped, opening up her psychic senses as far as they could possibly go, and then further still. If they hadn't been in a shielded space, every passing thought and feeling would have flooded in on her, with nothing but her own will to stand against them. Julian's own shields were locked as tight as they could go, so that he wouldn't inadvertently push his fear onto her. It was horrifying to see her so vulnerable, bound hand and foot and open to the world.

He laid the fingertips of his right hand on her head and his left hand on her pubic bone. Her chakras were blazing points of light beneath his touch, forming a pathway for him to follow. From the seventh down to the first, and then Julian was in freefall, diving into her spirit.

An inferno blazed around him, fire without heat. What could he do, if that power were his? The thought was exhilarating. No wonder people wanted this drug: with it, Julian might even be the equal of a sidhe.

But all of Kim's current power wouldn't help him with the shield. That work was done by ordinary bloods, people far less powerful in raw terms than any wilder. And it would be an unconscionable theft, a betrayal of Kim's trust. Julian ignored the temptation and focused on finding his way downward, through the impossibly intricate web of thoughts and memories, feelings and sensations, all the endless complexity of a human spirit.

Somewhere in that mass, there was a wall, and he was going to tear it down.

And when he did . . .

He'd put up a memory block to stop himself from even thinking about it around Kim, lest he betray himself by some word or hesitation. It was dangerous to be this deeply embedded in someone's spirit, even with all the defenses he could muster. Right now, of course, he was completely safe; the deep shield protected him, by making it impossible for Kim to take any action against him. But if he succeeded in his aim, then he would still be in the abyss when her gifts came flooding back to her, amplified beyond her control by the dust.

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 . . .”