Chains and Memory Read online

  CHAINS AND MEMORY

  Marie Brennan

  Published by Book View Café

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Marie Brennan

  All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-569-4

  Cover art by Avery Liell-Kok

  Cover design by Amy Sterling Casil

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  I’d met senators before. Jie Yin had been an acquaintance of my mother’s since high school; I still remembered the time she spilled ice cream down the front of her dress at my parents’ Labor Day barbeque, and I helped her sponge it off.

  Meeting a senator on Capitol Hill was an entirely different thing.

  Julia Ramos was not an old friend of my mother’s, and her office stood behind a silver-lined iron fence positioned to disrupt any incoming magic. My visit was not a social occasion. Ramos was one of the people who held my future in her hands.

  I’d been to her office twice before, both times in the company of my mother, who leveraged her friendship with Senator Yin to get an introduction. This time, though, I was on my own. The Dirksen Building sprawled to either side of me as I came up the front steps, a blocky, mid-twentieth-century structure that made only passing nod to classical elegance. The effect wasn’t exactly friendly.

  Or maybe that was just my apprehension talking. Ramos wouldn’t have asked me to come by after work unless she had major news.

  The guards must have been told to expect me, because I got through the security screening in record time. I almost wished it had taken longer; my feet dragged as I climbed the stairs. Major news could be good or bad. I’d been sorely tempted to pull out my tarot cards and ask which way things were headed, but it was hard to get clear indicators on a question too close to yourself, and questions didn’t get much closer than this one.

  A lot of people had already gone home, but there were still plenty of staffers pulling late hours for their bosses. I passed half a dozen people on my way to Ramos’ office, and if five of them were too well-disciplined to double-take at the sight of me, I knew all six recognized my face—or rather, my eyes. No doubt they all knew what Ramos was working on. I wondered if I’d be the main topic of gossip over the coffee maker tomorrow.

  It was a relief to pass through Ramos’ door at last. Her personal assistant Eduardo greeted me and nodded toward the inner door. “She’s waiting for you.”

  At least I wouldn’t have extra time to fret myself into insanity. On the other hand, it also meant I didn’t have time to compose myself. Drawing a deep breath, I squared my shoulders and went in.

  Julia Ramos was a tiny woman, barely higher than my shoulder, with hair more black-streaked grey than the reverse. She carried herself with a presence three times larger than her body, though. I imagined she had to, if she wanted to get business done on Capitol Hill. And she didn’t flinch from anything: when I came in, she rose and shook my hand, in a grip no less firm for being so small. My touch had to make her skin crawl—she was a baseline, no psychic gifts at all—but she showed no sign of it. “Kimberly, thank you for coming. Have a seat. Would you like Eduardo to get you a drink?”

  “Just water, thanks.” I said the same thing every time I came. My mouth was dry with nerves.

  Fortunately, Ramos didn’t beat around the bush. She picked up a thick file from her desk and said, “This is what we’ll be taking to conference tomorrow morning. Do you want to read it? The part that has to do with you, that is.”

  The ice rattled as I took my glass of water from Eduardo. You would think, with me specializing in divination, that I would be okay with the idea of somebody holding my fate in her hand. But it was like Schroedinger’s proverbial box: I might be free or I might be trapped. I wouldn’t know until I opened the folder.

  Or until I asked. “No, thank you,” I said, clutching the glass in both hands. “Just—can you summarize it?”

  “What’s in there isn’t what we hope to end up with anyway,” Ramos said, tossing the folder onto a table. “We have to leave ourselves room to bargain. So there’s a few pie-in-the-sky elements, which we’ll end up conceding to Atwell and his crew—very reluctantly, of course—and when all the horse-trading is done, we’ll have something we can all live with. At least, we can hope so.”

  I understood the political realities. Ramos and her people could write up my dream law, word for word . . . but it would never pass. The House and the Senate were far from agreeing on anything right now, my own situation least of all. The conference over this bill was going to be a nightmare.

  Ramos gestured me to one leather-upholstered chair and settled into another. “The basic thrust of it is this. The people who wrote the original text for SUPRA assumed that anybody with a Krauss rating above point five was born that way—and mostly they were right. There were still a few wilders left who survived getting their gifts during First Manifestation, but by then most of them had passed away. Which meant everybody was willing to ignore the few leftovers and worry about writing a law that would apply to the children born in the future.

  “But we can’t assume that anymore, which means we need to adapt our laws to suit the new reality. So what we’re proposing is a newer, more flexible definition for what constitutes a wilder. Or rather, doing away with ‘wilder’ as a single legal category, and creating several new groupings in its place.”

  I nodded. I’d read through the text of the original Supernatural Powers Regulatory Act several times, to the point where I could quote parts of it from memory, but I preferred to deal with the plain-language version. “What will the categories be?”

  She began ticking them off on her fingers. “The first category will cover everything from infants born with psychic gifts—in other words, wilders as people are used to thinking of them—up through any child who acquires an abnormally high Krauss rating before the usual manifestation of gifts at puberty. They will become wards of the state, as usual.” She paused, eyes flickering upward in a way that said she was suppressing a frown. “I’m hoping to get rid of the current provision about their families. There was no reason other than hysteria and prejudice to write that into SUPRA, and it will be much less traumatic for the older children if they don’t lose all contact with their birth parents.”

  That would be a substantial change from the current arrangement. I’d asked Julian once whether he wondered about his birth family, and he’d shrugged it off with a total and apparently sincere lack of concern. He had a family: all the rest of the Fiain. They mattered more to him than the people who contributed DNA before handing him over to the state. But if the Centers started taking in children who had grown up in normal households, the close-knit bond between wilders might start to fray.

  Ramos continued on, not pausing for digression. “The second group are children whose Krauss rating becomes elevated after ordinary manifestation, but before the age of majority. They’ll be handled on a more individualized basis, depending on circumstances, but the general idea is that they go away to boarding school. Although the Centers will be responsible for training them, those children will not be wards of the state, and will retain contact with their families even if the first category doesn’t.”

  I couldn’t help but blow a breath out at that. This was what Ramos thought she could get through conference? She was a lot more optimistic than I was. Atwell wasn’t technically an Iron Shield, but he spent a lot of time listening to that crowd. They wouldn’t like seeing our curre
nt procedures revised this radically.

  If I was being honest with myself, it made me afraid for my own chances.

  “And so,” Ramos said, “we come to you.”

  Me, and everybody like me. Which at the moment was nobody . . . but that could change. The Otherworld was back, after untold thousands of years, and the sidhe had a way to jack up people’s Krauss ratings, inducing the runaway genetic mutation that turned an ordinary psychic into a wilder. What they had done to me, they could do to other people.

  But right now, what Ramos was saying applied to only one person on the planet.

  She said, “Bloods who have already reached the age of majority when their Krauss ratings increase will be evaluated by officials from one of the Centers, who will be given the power to require additional training if necessary. But that is the limit of their authority.” Ramos didn’t meet my gaze; she had the fortitude to endure a handshake for the sake of manners, but not eye contact. Still, she looked squarely at my chin when she said, “They won’t be able to shield you.”

  A shudder ran through me, down to my bones. That last bit wasn’t any kind of surprise; the whole reason I was here talking to Ramos, rather than being at the mercy of Atwell and the Iron Shields, was because she was willing to fight for my right to stay free. But hearing it still made me go weak with relief.

  This was the real point of contention. There were other laws that governed wilders, but most of them either didn’t apply to me—I was twenty-one; they couldn’t make me a ward of the state—or else weren’t much of a concern. It would be weird to be Kimberly Fiain, rather than Kimberly Argant-Dubois, and I’d be pissed at the forced change, but I could live with it.

  Whether I could live with the deep shield or not was something I’d prefer not to test.

  Every other wilder in the United States, and in most of the rest of the world, had it installed in them shortly after they were born. Julian had explained the basics to me last fall, when the sidhe first appeared and he was afraid they were going to find a way to control him. It was a permanent structure, anchored deep within the spirit, that allowed anyone with the key to shut down a wilder’s gifts in an instant.

  It was a training tool, and a necessary one. Nobody could maintain active shields on a kid for six years straight, until they were old enough to start learning control. And without some kind of block, those infants and toddlers would be lethally dangerous to themselves and everybody around them. So the deep shield let them grow up safely, in an educational framework that prepared them for the eventual release of their gifts. Once they were ready, the instructors would lift it—at first only for brief periods, getting longer as the kid’s control improved. By the time a wilder reached adulthood, he was fully trained and the shield was no longer necessary.

  But the structure for it was still there. And if that wilder ever thought about stepping out of line later on, the deep shield was a very effective threat.

  Julian hated it like poison. He’d spent two and a half years at Welton studying the theory and practice of shielding in a quest to get rid of the thing. These days I had a quest of my own: making sure nobody had a legal leg to stand on for inflicting it on me.

  If Ramos’ proposal made it into the draft legislation for the Otherworld Act, and if the Act got passed, then I would be safe. But . . . “What about the other two categories?”

  One thing I kept being grateful for: Ramos wasn’t the type of politician who buried you in a lot of puffery without ever quite answering the question. “Unfortunately, there’s no good answer for that. We have no feasible replacement for the deep shield when it comes to childhood training. So it will apply to Category One wilders, as usual. Category Two will be a grey zone, depending on what the Center recommends. Older children could potentially get away without it.”

  I doubted many of them would. The ability to control wilders as needed was too useful. “Okay, then what about removing it from adults?”

  Ramos shook her head before the words were even out. She knew that question was coming. “I’m sorry, Kim. Not right now. Not this bill. If we even touch that subject, it will guarantee failure for the whole thing. The Otherworld is back; sooner or later we’re going to have sidhe walking the streets of American cities. Nobody wants to hear that we’re removing safeguards—no matter how good the arguments for it are. But this creates a precedent: if you don’t have the deep shield, it becomes much more difficult to justify keeping fully trained wilders under that kind of control. Give it a little while, and we’ll have a basis of support for removing it from the others.”

  I’d heard that reasoning before. My lawyer said nearly the same thing when he told me he was going to drag his heels every step of the way in my court case. The lower courts had all ruled that under the current law, I was a wilder, and therefore subject to the authority of the Division for Special Psychic Affairs—deep shield included. We’d managed to get a stay of execution on that ruling while we went through the appeals process, though, and Lotze had taken his sweet time filing every bit of paperwork he could. It was a delicate dance, making sure he didn’t piss off a judge along the way, but the payoff was that I was walking around unshielded the whole time, a safe and trustworthy member of society. It didn’t have any direct bearing on the legal issues, but the effect was still real. A judge who didn’t believe I needed to be shielded was a judge inclined to look on our side’s case with a favorable eye.

  In political terms, I was a live grenade nobody wanted to be left holding. Congress wished the Supreme Court would rule on my case so they wouldn’t have to rewrite the law to deal with pesky ambiguities like me. The Supreme Court wanted Congress to fix the law so they wouldn’t have to rule on my case. And the Division for Special Psychic Affairs was screaming bloody murder the whole time, because their job was to make sure wilders didn’t cause mayhem in the streets. A brand-new wilder with no shield and only half a college degree in divination under her belt was pretty much their nightmare scenario.

  The worst part was, they weren’t entirely wrong. Before this happened to me, I didn’t use pyrokinesis much because my gift for it was really weak. Now I didn’t use it at all, because I couldn’t trust myself not to fireball an entire candle when I meant to light the wick. I’d spent the last nine years with a toolbox containing things ranging from screwdrivers to needle-nosed pliers, and then the Unseelie hid the toolbox and handed me a sledgehammer. I was still trying to find where my subtlety had gone.

  Which meant, among other things, that I was being exceedingly careful about reading other people. Ramos was hard to read anyway; being a baseline, she couldn’t do any of the unconscious telepathic projection that bloods often did. I had to go by body language alone, and that was an eye-opening experience. I didn’t realize how much time I’d spent around psychics until I found myself working with somebody who had no gifts at all.

  We talked a bit longer after that, mainly questions of how long conference would take—Ramos said, “Your tarot cards might know, but I sure as hell don’t”—and what little I could do to help. My mother had been acting as my advocate, working every D.C. connection she had on my behalf, but my own use basically ended at being a poster child for the cause.

  Which was galling as hell after last fall. I’d been an active participant in the return of the sidhe, even to the point of being kidnapped and genetically rewritten by the Unseelie. Now I was just a bystander.

  Maybe it was my frustration that made me pause as I was about to head out. “Did you need something else?” Ramos asked, already halfway back to her desk.

  Part of me said I shouldn’t ask, but the words refused to stay down. “Senator . . . don’t take this the wrong way. But — why are you helping me?”

  She stopped, laying her hands on the surface of her desk. Her steady regard made me shift uncomfortably. “You mean, why would a baseline like me take an interest in a cause that is so profoundly about sidhe blood and its gifts.”

  I never would have said it that way.
But now that she had, I didn’t want to lie. I nodded.

  Ramos looked down at her hands. She wore a wedding ring, and touched it now with her thumb, rotating it slightly. “You never knew my wife. She passed away a few years ago—she was quite a bit older than I am. She was a blood, and a doctor. Her specialty was dealing with psi-sickness.”

  I swallowed hard. The return of the sidhe had brought the answers to a lot of questions, one of which was the nature of psi-sickness. It turned out to be the flip side of the wilder coin: if people like Julian were the success story, my brother Noah and others like him were the failures. I was lucky I’d survived what the Unseelie did to me. My odds had not been very good.

  Ramos said, “My wife had a child when she was much younger. A wilder. I haven’t mentioned it before now because I don’t feel right trying to claim her experience for my own; I’m not the one who lost a child to the current law. But I know that if she were still alive, she would have supported you.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” I said quietly. It seemed insufficient somehow, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I am not doing this only for Carrina,” Ramos said, her voice stronger. “Don’t start thinking you’re only a pity case, a memorial for my late wife. But that is where it started.”

  I would have accepted being a pity case, if it meant having an ally as effective as Ramos. But I was glad to be more than that. “Good luck tomorrow,” I said, and headed home to fret.

  ~

  “Mr. Fiain!”

  Surprise and confusion stopped Julian in his tracks. Almost no one called him that, because every wilder was a Fiain. Even in official situations, they usually went by their first names. The only reason for someone to call him “Mr. Fiain” was if the speaker had no idea who he was.

  He turned to look, wondering if someone was in trouble and calling for a Guardian—someone they assumed was a Guardian—to help. What he found instead was a table with a middle-aged woman standing behind it, and an array of flyers in front of her held down by lumps of crystal. It was still possible she needed help, though, so he kept his expression neutral as he approached. “Yes?”