The others, now plus Shiel, were playing Shiel’s war game when I got back. I hadn’t been expecting it, but I wasn’t terribly surprised… I had been gone for hours, and others had wanted to play. Two had gone to see if her friend Hazel was back and if she wanted to play. There were two games going at the moment, with Ian playing Shiel and Steff playing Dee.

The questions about how my session went didn’t go beyond “How did it go?” and my answer of “Good, I think.” wasn’t scrutinized, which was nice. It was good to be able to just sort of slip back into things.

“Do you want in on our game, Mack?” Steff asked me. “If you jumped in with a fresh army, you’d probably stand a pretty decent chance of catching up even as a newbie.”

“Yeah, still not interested in playing army,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I’m not interested in war myself, in particular,” Shiel said. “Violence for self-defense and even pre-emptive strikes can be justified to secure rights, but armed struggles and the periods of chaos they cause tend to go poorly for the least powerful groups. I’m more interested in the tactical side of it. Every situation is like a puzzle, and finding the right tactics will unlock the solution.”

“I can see the intellectual appeal of that,” Amaranth said. “Though, I wonder why you couldn’t get the same effect using something more abstract than warriors holding weapons? I mean, I know they’re not actual people fighting and dying, they’re just game pieces. But if it’s just about problem-solving, why not go all the way and just have different game pieces?”

“Well, it’s not just problem-solving,” Shiel said. “Not even for me, and of course other people play for their own reasons. I suppose on a practical level, it keeps things easy to relate to and allows more diversity in choices. I mean, if you changed the generic infantry to Unit Type 1 and the generic cavalry to Unit Type 2 and made their pieces abstract symbols or numerals, there would be nothing about the 2s that told you at a glance that they cover more ground in a move, or why. And there’d be less reason to make up different subtypes. If goblins on wolf-back or riding on giant swamp rats became Unit Type 2.50 and 2.51, what would the point be?”

“Making them people lets you turn it into a story,” Steff said. “I think you’d like that, Mack.”

“Okay, but it’s still big troop movements and all… that’s not what interests me in fantasy or in history,” I said. “It’s the individual stories. I mean, when I did modern Magisterian history in high school, our text books was this super patriotic one that focused on all the ‘adventuring opportunities’ that imperial troops had during the Chaos Wars and all the little conflicts that followed it, but the part that interested me were in the sidebars where they had personal accounts from people who’d served, or people who’d been there during a battle. That’s something I can get into.”

“So give the little people names and make sure you have one of them tell the others about his girl back home just before you move them into arbalest range,” Steff said.

“Maybe you’d be more interested in roleplaying games, then,” Ian said.

“Yeah, can you picture me sitting around on Friday nights playing Subways and Scientists?” I said.

“Yes,” Steff and Ian said at the same time.

“Anyway, Shiel,” I said. “To get back to what you were saying… how does the puzzle-solving approach even work when the movement of the other pieces are controlled by someone else?”

“You have to look at your opponent as being part of the puzzle,” Shiel said. “If I’m playing against a seasoned player, I have to expect that they’ll recognize certain gambits, but because of that I also can predict their responses to a degree. When I play against Hazel, I have more freedom to move but I also have to react more within the moment. She’d probably win half her games out of luck if she played against some of the tournament players in the warrens. They’re too used to playing against people who share the same unspoken assumptions that they do.”

“But even if you’re doing everything ‘right’ and you’re tailoring your tactics to your opponent, you could still lose,” I said. “I mean, they could be doing the same thing, or they could realize what you’re doing.”

“Yes,” Shiel said. “But that’s life. Sometimes you do everything right and you still lose. We call that… well, the word is bolkub, but it translates as ‘cave-in’. Because nobody does any new excavation on a whim. Everything is checked, double-checked, and triple-checked. All the tools and materials used are enchanted as powerfully as the armaments and fortifications we use at the outer layers of the warren. But sometimes, even with all that…”

A tic of sorts passed over her face that gave me the impression that her skin was shrugging.

“Sometimes the best-played game ends in a bolkub,” she said.

“What do you do then?” I asked.

“Lose,” she said.

Two came back, and after exchanging greetings, she said, “My friend Hazel says to say that she’ll be more than happy to come and teach Shiel a thing or two about that game of hers if Amaranth thinks she can keep her mind and her mouth on her own business.”

“Oh, well, that’s terribly mature of her,” Amaranth said. Two was looking at her expectantly. She added, “It’s not like she’s going to be able to avoid this forever. What’s she going to do when she’s ten months pregnant?”

“What happens at ten months?” Shiel asked. “Is that when the fetus becomes public property?”

“What? No..”

“I guess it’s still none of your business, then,” Shiel said.

“I am inclined to agree,” Dee said. “Perhaps you should take into consideration that her recalcitrant attitude towards discussing the matter with you does not necessarily equal recalcitrance in ‘dealing with’ it.”

“But if she won’t even admit to herself…”

“What she admits to herself is known to herself,” Dee said. “It may or may not resemble anything that she admits to you.”

“Two’s still waiting for a real answer,” Ian pointed out.

“Oh!” Amaranth said. “I’m sorry… Two, please tell Hazel that her business is her business, I guess.”

“That’s okay, I forgive you,” Two said. “Please excuse me while I tell her that.”

When she came back with Hazel a minute or so later, I really thought Amaranth’s eyes or mouth were going to leap out of her skull, but she restrained herself.

“That’s right,” Hazel said, and that’s all she said before negotiating her entry into Ian and Shiel’s game. If the miniature stone warfare held any appeal for me, it was the social aspect, and by that I meant it was fun to watch Hazel valiantly try to convince herself, Shiel, and possibly the tiny soldiers that she was winning. She was like a one woman wartime propaganda department.

At least she seemed to be having fun, and maybe that was the key to her outrageous bravado… she wasn’t trying to beat Shiel, she was enjoying the process of losing. In an actual war, there would probably be worse people to be stuck in a desperate situation with than Two’s friend Hazel.

Steff and Dee’s game was a good deal quieter, and had been even before Two brought Hazel in. It was kind of weird to watch the two of them doing something together. With the game in between them, there was a level of comfort they didn’t usually show. There were so many reasons the two of them might not have worked as friends. There was the racial rivalry that Steff couldn’t shed no matter how much she outwardly rejected elven attitudes, and to Dee Steff was not just other but lesser, no matter how much she might protest otherwise. They were both prejudiced, but both were better than their prejudices.

Amaranth, Two, and I were spectators, though Two was engaged with the games much more than Amaranth and I were. There were times where she pointed out a missed opportunity or a rule infraction in the making… though never to Hazel, which made me wonder if Amaranth wasn’t the only one to be given a topical ultimatum. It hardly mattered, though, since Shiel caught Hazel’s errors anyway.

Saturday gave way to Sunday, where a trip to the library helped me slide a little bit closer to normal. Not the old, familiar normal, if there had been one… a new normal, with some comforting features. The very structure of the week did a lot to help people adjust to things, I realized… you did something for a few days and it was new and different and maybe scary or uncomfortable and you kept waiting for it to click. Before it could, though, here comes a break in the rhythm and then you’re back it. Something like going to class didn’t become a routine on its own… it was going back to class after a break that made it feel like one.

I received a brief and apologetic a-mail from Lee that explained nothing but said that he would understand if I would prefer to seek other representation and that he would do what he could to help me find it.

I didn’t respond immediately, because I didn’t know how to respond to it… I thought if Lee were trying to drop me as a client he’d be more direct about it, so it seemed like he really sincerely believed I’d want nothing to do with him. Unless the encounter in Embries’s office had been his idea, and I doubted that, I couldn’t see why.

It was Wednesday afternoon before I knew it, and that meant I’d made very little headway on the sheets Teddi had given me. Teddi was understanding about it.

“Remember what I said about writing?” she asked.

“And not knowing what to write down?”

“Yes,” she said. “Narrowing your gaze like this is a necessary step, but it’s a skill that has to be learned. Have you ever kept a journal?”

“I’ve tried it, in the past,” I said. “I couldn’t really make a habit of it, and anyway, I was always more interested in things that were happening to other people, or things that weren’t happening to me.”

“Like journalism?”

“More like fiction,” I said.

“Well, let’s try something else then,” she said. “Between this session and the next one, I want you to make a note… mental note, or a written one if necessary… any time you find yourself saying or thinking something like ‘Sometimes, it just feels like…’ or ‘I don’t understand why…’. Those are the sorts of things that might make good starting points. They seem to work for other people.”

“So, is there anything we can actually do now besides just talking?”

“You seem to expect me to tell you that it’s pointless to be here,” she said.

“I guess I have low expectations,” I said. “Not about this, or you, specifically… just in general. I can’t exactly get away from the fact that you’re working at a handicap with me.”

“Well… I’ve already told you how we can try a mental contact, but your… conscientiousness… about that has me researching other alternatives,” Teddi said. “For instance, there are spells that allow communication through thought.”

“Wouldn’t they have the same problem?”

“As it happens, no,” Teddi said. “If a spell picks a word out of your head and conducts it to mine, it’s no more a direct mental contact than when you do the same with your voice. It still wouldn’t be the same thing that I’m used to doing, but I’ve been told by my colleagues in the College of Communication that if such a spell is properly attuned… or rather, improperly attuned so as to suit our purposes… it can pick up stray thoughts, things lurking beneath the surface, bits of memories, and so on.”

“I’m not sure I want to be the test homunculus for someone’s mind-magic,” I said.

“Alright,” Teddi said. “I just wanted to show you that there are possibilities out there. Do you mind if I keep looking into them?”

“No,” I said. “Feel free.”

“Okay, so if you don’t have anything specific you want to address, how about we go back to something you said last time?”

“Okay, sure,” I said.

“You said you could do a lot of damage, if you were careless,” Teddi said. “And that you had done ‘some’ damage already. Would you mind if we explore that?”

“The damage?”

“The feeling,” she said. “The fear. Do you see yourself as a threat, Mackenzie?”

There was a cold prickle of suspicion in my stomach, as involuntary a reflex as Amaranth’s need to help Hazel sort out her troubles or Steff or Dee’s reactions to each other. I could imagine someone from Law or the IBF poring over my file and saying “Gotcha!” or “Aha!” or something when they find the part where I admit I think I’m a threat to others.

“I’m not sure that I’d say it in those words,” I said.

“Noted,” Teddi said. “Or, unnoted.”

“My girlfriend… she’s immortal,” I said. “Not just ageless but immortal. I mean, it’s sort of situational but nothing I can do here could harm her in the long term. But I can still hurt her. She’s… been burned. Anybody else, any of my friends… some of them could defend themselves if something went wrong, but if I just lashed out with all my strength at the wrong moment…”

“How often do you use all your strength?”

“Never, that I can think of,” I said. “But I’m clumsy, and I’m kind of impulsive. I’ve been known to overreact.”

“Physically?”

“Not so much, I guess,” I said. “But if I can’t control my emotions, it could happen anyway.”

“Let’s follow that, then,” she said.

I did my best to explain to her how violence made me feel… the practiced disdain I put on for those who reveled in it, and the very real and very visceral churning of my gut at being involved in it… and even the perverse hunger for it I’d felt when under demonic influence, notably my own. That was difficult to talk about. It took up a lot of the session without actually going anywhere or resolving anything, but getting that out still felt… well, it wasn’t an accomplishment, exactly, but it was something.

“The really awful thing is,” I said, “is that if I’m honest with myself… what worries me the most is what would happen to me if I did something bad. The consequences to me. I mean, I’d be devastated if I killed someone, but… I’d also be dead, most likely.”

“It’s not easy to face that as an eighteen-year-old,” Teddi said.

“But other people do,” I said. “It’s a dangerous world.”

“It is, but a surprisingly large number of people go for years without giving a thought to how dangerous it can be,” she said. “It sounds like you can’t avoid it.”

“Well, it’s not like I spend every day thinking about death,” I said. “Or that it even comes up that often in so many words… my grandmother sort of managed to instill in me a generalized terror of it. Of… messing up, and then being killed. She made it very clear that she’d be the one to do it, but she also made it clear that if she didn’t someone else would. She used to keep buckets by my bed, two with regular water and one with holy water, in case I had an ‘accident’. When I got better at controlling my fire, she got rid of the regular water, but the holy water stayed. When I left for good, I thought about kicking it over out of spite, but… well, I gave it a wide berth. I’m honestly surprised I don’t have a bucket phobia.”

“That’s pretty poor parenting,” Teddi said. “To put it mildly. Could you feel the sanctity of the water?”

“It didn’t exactly radiate divine energy, no,” I said. “I figured it’s sort of inert. I might have, if I’d held my hand over it or something, but I didn’t ever do that.” I thought about the demonstration my grandmother had given me, with her own hand and the hot oil, but I wasn’t ready… wasn’t able… to share that yet.

“My understanding is that water doesn’t hold sanctity any better than it holds magic,” Teddi said. “Outside of a specially consecrated vessel, it becomes just plain water pretty quickly. Even a holy vessel can’t keep it in if it’s open… that’s why clerics reconsecrate the fonts in the temples so often.”

I realized as she said this that I knew it… that was pretty much a fundamental property of water. It was pure. It washed things away. The very reasons that so many religions liked it symbolically made it a poor choice for a sacramental liquid.

“Even if she was bluffing about that, I don’t think she was bluffing in general,” I said. “And even if it was just regular water… well, maybe she didn’t want me to be killed or maimed accidentally. She could have blessed it herself as she dumped it over me.”

“True,” Teddi said. “And I don’t want to minimize what she did to you, either. The effects were the same, regardless.”

“So, yeah… I grew up with it being pounded into my head that tomorrow or the day after I would probably go on an evil rampage and be slain,” I said. “And I still have that in my head, even when I’m trying to plan for the future… which I am. I mean, I’m in college to try to have a life and a career, and I’m making plans for the summer, sort of.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Not going home, for one thing,” I said. “I mean, back to my grandmother’s. I have the opportunity to stay on campus, helping one of my professors and going to classes during the summer, but… well… I’m starting to appreciate the importance of breaks in life.”

“What’s that?”

“They let you come back to things,” I said. “The funny thing is that I’ve gone from thinking I’m mostly going to be killed in my sleep one night to facing the prospect of living halfway to forever. I’d never really thought about how long half-demons live. Half-elves can live for centuries, if not millennia, and they probably inherit more of the ‘mortal failing’ stuff since both of their parents are from this plane. If I don’t die tomorrow, I could live a thousand years… but all I really want is to have a life. A lifetime. And now that I’m thinking about it, it almost feels like these few years could be the most dangerous ones of my life.”

“More dangerous than living with a woman who threatened to kill you in your sleep?”

“Well, back home… when I was in high school, I mean… she sort of protected me, too,” I said. “She made it clear that she would ‘destroy’ me, but she was also going to wait until I did something to deserve it. Here, I’m more on my own. Whatever consequences would or wouldn’t fall on someone who messed with me, there’s no… well, I mean, I’d like to think that if someone out-and-out murdered me there’d be a criminal investigation and all, but for someone who sees me as a threat or a monster or a non-person it’s all really diffuse and abstract compared to having someone specific in their face saying ‘no, you can’t kill her’. Back home, my grandmother was a force in the community. No one would mess with her. Here, if someone looks at me and thinks, ‘I could make the world a better place by taking her out of it,’ what’s to stop them?”

“Have you been attacked often?”

“Not on a daily basis,” I said. “And more often by the people in Harlowe than by random human students. But it would only take one person who doesn’t think there will be any consequences for killing a half-demon or doesn’t care.”

“Wouldn’t that have been true back home, too?” Teddi asked. “It must have crossed your mind that someone might not have had as much respect for your grandmother.”

“My world was smaller there,” I said. “I’m pretty sure there are more people living on campus than there were in the town I grew up in, and that includes the outlying farming communities.”

“So it’s a matter of odds,” Teddi said. “But the world is a bigger place than MU… why do you think you’d feel safer outside it?”

“Fewer people would know I’m a demon,” I said. “Okay, yeah, I’ve attracted a bit of attention, but if I keep my head down for the next three years, then who out there is going to know who I am?”

“Do you think hiding would feel safer”

“Not hiding, so much as not revealing,” I said.

“Do you regret revealing yourself as a half-demon?”

“It happened,” I said. “It wasn’t really my choice. Circumstances just sort of piled up on me…”

“And these circumstances are unique to a college campus?”

“Possibly,” I said. “Possibly not. I guess I don’t really know if I’ll be able to keep the secret any better out in the ‘real world’… but it’ll be another chance to try.”

“And if it doesn’t work out, will you pick up and move? Keep your head down for another four or five years? Like you said, you could live a very long time… if you don’t get this right the first hundred times, you might have a chance to try again.”

“Yeah, I see your point,” I said. “Really, I don’t want to live a life in hiding or on the run… and that’s why I think I’d probably be dead if I did screw up. Even if I could run and get away, I wouldn’t be a college student, I wouldn’t grow up to be an enchanter, I would never have a good house and a good life… I’d be another monster hiding in the wilderness, skulking around the edges of civilization… which I suppose means that in a really fucked-up sense I’m afraid of turning out like my father.”

“That isn’t particularly ‘fucked-up’,” Teddi said. “It’s a good thing to be concerned about, as long as you’re doing so healthily. Did you ever meet your father?”

“Yes and no,” I said, then made the decision to not talk around this at all. There were enough impediments in our conversation as it was. “He comes to me in dreams sometimes… I know it’s actually him, or actually someone and not just me because they aren’t like my regular dreams. They’re more coherent, lucid.”

“That’s actually pretty common with dream visitations, when one mind is sharply stronger than another,” Teddi said. “There are no hard or fast rules about anything relating to dreams, but if one party is asleep and the other party isn’t, the conscious party can usually exercise a fine degree of control or impose a viewpoint.”

“So much for the ‘this is my dream’ thing,” I said. “I suppose that only works in television shows.”

“If it is your dream, then you do ultimately have certain powers, usually including the ability to wake up,” Teddi said. “Lucid dreams are often fairly easy to wake up from. If it happens in the future, you might try that.”

“That’s… really kind of obvious, in retrospect,” I said.

“Well, it’s why they pay me the shiny bucks,” Teddi said. “What does your father do in your dreams?”

“He tries to give me advice, mostly,” I said. “At least, that’s what he tries to pass it of as. Just fatherly advice… but he does things like refer to people as insects, and one time he was dismembering people, which kind of undermines his whole ‘really-I’m-just-a-concerned-father’ routine. He’s… not the sort of person you’d want to take advice from. But even when he’s not really hiding the fact that he’s evil, he’s still… well, there’s something compelling about him. I’d really like to be able to shut him out for good.”

“That is something I might be able to help you with. I’ll have to do some research. It’s a difficult situation,” Teddi said. “You probably realize that things could get complicated for you if you sought any official help in dealing with him, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m hoping that he’ll lose interest, but I’m not sure that’s worth hoping for. It seems like he was already willing to wait until I moved out from my grandmother’s house.”

“So, you think he has plans for you.”

“I’m sure he does,” I said.

“Do you have any idea what they are?”

“No, and I don’t want to know,” I said. “If he offered to share them with me, I’m sure whatever he’d tell me would just be like a wriggling bit of bait on the end of his hook. Steff, my… well, you know who Steff is. She said something like, when you’re dealing with someone you know is untrustworthy, you don’t figure out if each thing they say is worth trusting or not. That’s what untrustworthy means.”

“I’m not sure I would endorse that absolute a view as good advice when dealing with people in general,” she said. “But there is some truth to it. A person… and I’m talking about denizens of this plane in particular… is not categorically trustworthy or not, but there are points where you have to go, ‘This isn’t worth my time. This isn’t worth the grief.’ And I have the impression that you’ve been learning that.”

“Yeah, I suppose I have,” I said. “If there’s a big moral to my first taste of semi-adulthood, I suppose that’s it.” I realized then that I knew where I needed to start. I realized right after that realization that we were getting near the end of the session. “Um, in case I forget, could you please make a note to ask me about Puddy next time?”

“Duly noted,” she said, and because she picked up her tablet when she said that I realized that she hadn’t written anything down before that. “On the subject of noting things, I’d like to ask you to try something for next time.”

“Okay,” I said. “What?”

“When I said you should write it down if you find yourself thinking ‘sometimes it just feels like…’, I was only half-joking,” she said. “I’d like you to forget about the sheets and try to keep a journal. Write down what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. This isn’t homework. You’re not going to be graded on it. You don’t even have to show it to me, but if you do it, it might help you see patterns that you’re missing, or pick up on threads that you’d want to address if only you knew they were there.”

“If therapy and writing are so much like each other, what makes you think I’ll be any better at dealing with a blank page?” I asked.

“Nothing in particular,” she said. “But when one thing doesn’t work, you try another one.”

“I’m sorry I’m so difficult to work with,” I said.

“None of that,” Teddi said. “I told you that you’re not my challenge for the year. You know, a lot of people end up doing the ‘Oh, by the way, here’s what’s really on my mind.’ thing as they’re on the way out the door, and they don’t commit to talking about it next time.”

“I guess I did commit to talking about Puddy, huh?” I said.

“Oh, you can still back out,” Teddi said. “This early in the process, if it comes to a question of you showing up versus staying away in order to avoid dealing with something, I’d rather you show up… and I mean that. Mental healing can be a struggle, but sometimes we have to ease our way towards a place where we have the strength to conduct that struggle. As long as I can tell you’re easing, I’m always going to think it’s worth your time to be here.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll try to remember that.”

“I’ll send you another reminder.”

“Are they necessary?” I asked, looking at a page asking me to write out my goals. What were my goals? I didn’t really know what the mental healing process consisted of or what it was capable of achieving, exactly.

“They can be useful,” she said. “Some people come in here with one specific problem, or they otherwise have a clear agenda. Some people come in with nothing more than ‘I want to be better.’”

“I don’t think I really fall into either category,” I said. “But… I suppose I’m more like the second one. I know you need something more to go on than ‘I want to be better’, but I didn’t really have anything more substantial than the fact that I’ve been through some messed up stuff and I have a lot of issues and things about my life that I don’t really enjoy.”

“When you say ‘my life’,” Teddi said, and I would almost swear she was projecting the concept of “aha!” directly into my brain as she said it, “are you talking about circumstances that surround you, or are you talking about internal aspects?”

“You mean, do I like myself?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“Because you’re being diplomatic?”

“Because I’m being precise,” she said. “There are going to be aspects of yourself that you do like and aspects you don’t like. That’s true of any person. The question is, are you here to learn to deal with those parts of yourself that you don’t like?”

“‘Deal with’ as in ‘put up with’, or ‘deal with’ as in change?”

“Either or both may be appropriate or possible,” Teddi said. “You see, Mack… mental healing isn’t like physical healing. Physical health is a thing, a quality. If someone’s body gets sick, they just need to be cured. A body in its normal state is healthy and undamaged, and healing spells just reset it back to that. Mental healing doesn’t work like that. Mental health is… well, it’s more like an opinion.”

“An opinion?” I repeated.

“Do you feel like you’re okay?” she asked.

“Honestly? No.”

“Then you need mental healing,” she said.

“So, if I believed I didn’t then I wouldn’t,” I said.

“If you believed you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here,” she said.

“So there’s no such thing as a person who believes they’re okay but who really badly needs some mental healing?” I asked.

“Well… people can have differing opinions, can’t they?” Teddi replied. “My point is that there is no baseline of health for the mind. There’s no normal to reset it back to.”

“Why do you suppose it’s like that?” I asked. “Why isn’t there like a ‘Cure Serious Issues’ potion I can take, or whatever? Why can’t a wizard just heal my mind?”

“Well, think about what a spell like that would actually be doing,” Teddi said. “If your mind is wounded, what are the wounds?”

“I don’t know, my memories, I guess?”

“Memories,” Teddi said. “Experiences. Patterns of thought and behavior. Imagine a potion removing those things… what would be left?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Would it be so bad finding out?”

“There’s a theory among alchemists that potions of forgetfulness work by healing the mind,” Teddi said. “Under this theory, every lingering thought or pattern… every memory… is a wound on the mind. Sometimes, it is necessary to remove something from the mind in order to heal the person, but we obviously have to be more selective than an all-out healing spell could be.”

I remembered the warning I’d been given when I got my piercings. It hadn’t really crossed my mind much since then, even though I was still in the period where a non-extremely-localized healing spell could cause a lot of sudden discomfort.

“Anyway,” Teddi said, “Like I believe you said, you’ve got a lot on your mind… those sheets aren’t necessary in the sense that anybody will require you to complete them, but they can be useful.”

“The problem is that I’m not even sure where to begin,” I said. “I feel like I could probably fill ten times this space, if I sat down and started writing.”

“Then just sit down and start,” Teddi said. “Maybe eventually you will fill that many pages, but for now, what you put in the space you have will be where we begin. You know, some people say that writing can be like therapy… I believe that’s true, but I also believe the reverse.”

“Therapy can be like writing?”

She nodded.

“Do you do much writing, Mack?” she asked.

“I used to,” I said.

“Have you ever had so many ideas in your head that it seemed like you could just sit down and start writing and they would just all come pouring out?” she asked. “But then you sit down with a piece of paper in front of you, and can’t think of any one specific thing in particular to write down?”

I nodded.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do know what that’s like.”

“Well, this can be like that,” she said. “You have days or weeks between sessions and your head’s full of thoughts, but then you have an hour or two to do something with them and… nothing comes.”

“So is there any point to me being here right now?”

“That’s up to you,” Teddi said. “I’ve told you I’m free and I don’t mind being here, so it’s really a case of what you want to do with your time. Would you like to hear an observation?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s what I’m here for.”

“If you’ll have a better idea what we should talk about after filling out that sheet, you might have a better idea how to fill it out after we’ve talked more.”

And so we ended up just talking. There was no agenda, there were no goals. We paused briefly when Audra came back to gather up the files that Teddi had been sorting and take them to another room.

I think I learned more about Teddi than she did about me in that first session, at least in terms of the number of facts recounted. I’m sure she took away quite a lot of stuff about me even when she was just telling me about her childhood, which was a lot in line with what I expected for someone from such an old family with such old money: dance recitals, private schools, riding lessons.

“Did you have your own horse?” I asked.

Something about the question seemed to surprise her, or make her realize something surprising.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Did you have one that was owned by your family?” I asked.

“No, no,” she said. “I mean, there would have been money for one if I’d wanted one, but it never occurred to me… I guess it would have been inconvenient. Our house didn’t have any stables. None of the houses did, my grandparents’ or my uncle’s or any of the cousins we visited. I guess I sort of grew up thinking that horses weren’t something you kept at a house. I remember thinking it was sort of novel the first time I visited a friend whose family did have stables, but by that point I was over my pretty pretty pony phase.”

“Your family has dwarven stock, doesn’t it?” I said. “Somewhere way back.”

“Good guess,” she said. “You got that from the lack of stables?”

“Well, it fit with the sort of clannish attitude towards property,” I said. “I mean, I’m sure there are families with nothing but human blood and proud of it who set up legal hurdles to protect their assets, but I can’t imagine those assets wouldn’t have included horses a few hundred years back.”

Teddi nodded.

“Dwarves are one of the longer-lived mortal races,” she said. “So they tend to think in terms of ancestors and descendants in a fairly distinctive way. I didn’t realize that was a dwarven thing until I went to college. My school was women’s territory, for dwarves. A woman in my class had a textbook that was sixty years out of date. It had been meticulously updated several times. There were a lot of jokes about how cheap dwarves are, but it’s more a matter of… well, stone lasts. Gold lasts. A thing that one person uses once isn’t that valuable, to the dwarven perspective.”

A lot of the things in my mother’s house had been older, but mostly that was because she’d got them second or third hand. My grandmother’s house had been full of things that were probably older than she was, though that hadn’t occurred to me during the years I was living there. They were relics of an older time, but so was she. I wondered about whether she’d intended to pass any more of them down, if things had gone differently. They’d been more strained than estranged, before my mother’s death.

“You’ve gone quiet again,” Teddi said. It wasn’t the first time I’d lapsed into thought during our conversation.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s your time,” she said again. “Spend it as you will. If you need to gather your thoughts, that’s fine. If you’re not yet sure if you’re ready to voice something, think about it for next time.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s more… it’s habit. I’m not used to having someone to talk to. Someone, else, I mean.”

“Do you talk to yourself a lot?”

“Does this question have a wrong answer?”

She laughed.

“Anyone who would lock someone up for talking to themselves isn’t much of a judge of mental health,” she said. “Having a confidante is important, and sometimes there are no other options. Also, how else do you get to know someone if not by having a conversation with them?”

“I’d like to get a little better at having conversations with other people,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “There you go. I do believe we have discovered a goal… and that makes this as good a time as any to mention that I haven’t eaten since noon.”

“Do we have to stop now?” I asked.

“We can, or we can break,” she said. “Or we can have something sent in. How do you feel about pizza? Oh, there’s that suspicious twitch again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it’s the most stereotypical college food, and the one that’s almost synonymous with the word ‘delivery’… but I kind of have… well, okay, this isn’t something I think is written down in a file in some vault somewhere in the first place, so I don’t even know why I thought…”

“In fairness, you are dealing with a mindreader,” she said. “But really, it’s just the most obvious and convenient choice. There are other options.”

“I just had pizza last night,” I said. “And I technically don’t have to eat food, so… you just get whatever you want.”

“Would it bother you to watch me eat?” she asked. The words hit me like a cold draft. “Oh… well… maybe we should break while I take care of that, then?”

“No,” I said quickly. I didn’t want her to think that this was a big thing, since it related to what I couldn’t talk about, and I also didn’t want it to become any bigger of a thing. “Let’s… I don’t know. I want to try something new, maybe. Not pizza. What do you recommend?”

“Well, the pizza place I like also does pasta and hot Vitulian sandwiches,” she said. “Meatballs, salami, that kind of thing.”

“I don’t know if I like that sort of thing,” I said.

“Is that because it’s something new, maybe?” she said. “I have some menus in my desk. They’re all places that I like so they could collectively be considered a very broad recommendation. I’ll let you see them and you can see if anything jumps out.”

I don’t know if she put the Vitulian place on top or if they just happened to be arranged that way. The meatball sandwich didn’t look any more appetizing than it sounded. Another one that had piles of shaved beef was kind of hard to look at… but in tearing my eyes away from it, I spotted something that looked better.

“Four cheese and tomato sandwich,” I read. “That sounds interesting.”

“The vegetarian option,” Teddi said.

“I guess,” I said. “That’s not specifically why… though, I suppose I’m not really in the mood for meat.”

“Did you only start eating food recently?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, again. I ate it growing up. I don’t really recall a lot of strong preferences. I think I had a mix of little kid pickiness and omnivoraciousness, pretty much.”

“That’s a good word,” Teddi said.

She put an order in. I apologetically noted that I’d left my money in my room, and she said I could pay next time. I didn’t really see the point of a “hot sandwich” as opposed to any other kind, unless it was a hamburger or something. I couldn’t picture how heating up a ham or turkey sandwich would improve it… and probably that was true for the sorts of sandwiches we got in the lunch room, but the toasted or grilled or whatever they did with it bread and gooey layer of cheese was pretty good. I had been thinking that tomatoes and cheese sounded a bit like pizza, but despite the similar cuisine it was really quite a different taste.

I felt better in a lot of ways after eating… more relaxed, and more trusting, I supposed. Maybe some people can eat guardedly, but I’m not one of them.

“You said you used to write,” Teddi asked me later on in the session.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fan fic… uh, fiction based on…”

“I know the term,” she said. “What fandom?”

“Mecknights, mostly,” I said.

“I don’t know that one,” she said. “Why’d you stop?”

“I didn’t set out to,” I said. “I just… well, I realized that I’d never get away from my grandmother if I didn’t get serious about going to college, and that meant more focus on school work and getting a job, which wasn’t easy. You were pretty right in judging my accent. I’m from Blackwater.”

“I suppose I should have known that,” Teddi said. “You and your grandmother have both been in the news. I try to block that stuff out when I’m dealing with you, though. I don’t know how much of that is true, how much of what’s important to some reporter actually loom large in your own mind, and so on… the things you tell me matter, Mack. It matters that you tell me them, when you tell me them, why you tell me them. That’s why I’d like to rely on what you tell me and what I can tell for myself instead of what I hear somewhere.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “What else does my voice tell you?”

“Either you pick up regional variations really quickly, or you’ve taken a little trouble to not sound like a wetlander,” Teddi said. “The accents are similar, but most people from Blackwater sound more like what the coasters think plainsfolk sound like.”

“It’s not really deliberate or anything,” I said. “I just… well, I guess at some point I decided it would be better to sound like the people on TV than the people all around me. In the long run, I mean. I never planned on staying in Blackwater. Anyway, we never lived in the swamp or anything. It was more hills and trees. It’s funny, you know, Prax is considered a prairie province and Blackwater is supposed to be the swamp province, but following the Enias River, it’s all hills and trees.”

“The grasslands open up more to the west,” Teddi said.

“What about me?” I said. “Not just where I’m from. You said that you learn to read other things. What does my voice tell you about me?”

“You’re somewhat guarded,” she said. “Except for a few times when strong emotion overtakes you, your voice has been really level.”

“Amaranth says I only have two volumes,” I said. “It’s funny, when I met Audra I was thinking that a friend of mine doesn’t really inflect her voice much. It never occurred to me that I might be the same.”

“When you get indignant,” she said, “there’s a… well, okay, I’m trying to project again. There’s a sort of conflict or imbalance or something in play there. It’s as though you’re really proud of yourself without actually believing in yourself.”

My first reaction was to say that sounded impossible, but my second reaction was that it was pretty accurate.

“How is that possible?” I asked, which addressed the first without denying the truth of her observation.

“If I had to put into words… and I suppose I do… I’d say it’s like you have confidence in the truth of what’s being said but you don’t have confidence in the speaker.”

“I am the speaker, though.”

“Do you have confidence in yourself?”

“No,” I said. “Even when I’m sure I’m correct, I can’t quite bring myself to believe I’m fundamentally right.”

“That’s not quite another goal, but it is a problem identified,” Teddi said. There were no timepieces in the room, but she glanced at a window. “Did you want to get back to your dorm before full dark?”

“Yeah, but… what?” I said. I hadn’t even noticed how much dimmer the room had become, to say nothing of the sky outside. “Wow, the time… I…”

“I think we should probably set an appointment,” Teddi said. “I’ll have to consult my calendar if you would like another weekend session; my Saturdays are pretty packed, ordinarily. Honestly, I’m getting to be booked up most weekday evenings, too.”

“How about Wednesday afternoons?” I asked. Monday seemed too soon… I wanted a few days to digest things, not just come back and try to start talking again. I felt like we’d made more progress in terms of a relationship than anything else, and that wasn’t bad… it was probably necessary, even. But it wouldn’t accomplish much in the long term.

“After classes?”

“I have a big break after lunch,” I said.

“I know I don’t have anyone at one on Wednesday,” she said. “It’s yours, if you want it.”

“Every week?”

“If you want it,” she said. “And you can a-mail me if there’s something on your mind at an odd hour, or if you’d just be more comfortable saying something in writing.”

“Okay,” I said. “So… I guess I’ll see you Wednesday, then.”

“If you hold on a moment, I can give you an appointment card,” she said. “And I can set up an automated reminder if you’d like.”

“You have no idea how good an idea that is.”

It was the weekend, after all… and even if his lack of availability had anything to do with recent events, it could be nothing more than him wanting to keep his head down for a few days, or have a chance to step back away from things.

He had a life outside of work, after all. Maybe this wasn’t universally true of lawyers, but it was in his case. He was planning a wedding, or at least he was party to one that was being planned… and that was just one more reason why it wasn’t necessarily suspicious or remarkable that he wasn’t around to take my reflection on a Saturday morning.

If some shadowy figure I didn’t recognize was answering his mirror and telling me that I should not concern myself with the whereabouts of Mr. Jenkins, I would have known that something was definitely going on and I shouldn’t trust anyone or anything, but with nothing but an ordinary canned image popping up and telling me how much he values his generic client or associate’s time… well, that didn’t give me much to go on.

If I had any real reason to be suspicious of the mental healing center, I would have just not gone… but it was in the same innocently menacing category as Lee’s absence. Steff and Dee vouched for the woman, there were all sorts of legitimate reasons she might have been available to answer at three in the morning… and really, if there was some sort of sinister shadowy something or other at work, wouldn’t they have gone out of their way to not be suspicious?

My brain wanted to fill in something like “unless they knew I’d think that”, but I wasn’t so far gone into the depths of paranoia as to believe that somebody might have instructed Lundegard to act suspiciously in order to lull me into a false sense of security.

Anyway, the really big shoe had already dropped… if there was an agenda at work here, it would be a little one. The school looking for information to use against me seemed like one possibility, and the reason I’d wanted to talk to Lee. In the absence of his advice, I supposed that I would just ask for a statement of confidentiality in writing so if they tried to do anything with anything I said we could turn it around on them.

It didn’t even have to be any bigger than one person… maybe “Teddi” was writing a book or something.

In any event, with no real chance of a literal ambush or anything concrete I could put my finger on, it seemed like the best thing to do was just go in. I could always leave, if it wasn’t on the level… it seemed like it would be tantamount to legal suicide for the school to keep me in the mental healing center against my will, given the facts in my case against them.

As soon as I thought that, though, it occurred to me that there was something more of a precedent for holding someone in a mental healing facility against their will. Okay, an extension on the side of the student healing center wasn’t exactly an asylum, but it didn’t seem completely inconceivable that the professional mental healers the school employed would be capable of making the determination to have someone put away for good.

It seemed mostly inconceivable that they would, for all the reasons that I’d told myself it was unlikely that imperial agents would make me disappear and more. Power had its limits, even when it was being abused. Without someone like Embries trying to get rid of me, I doubted the school could pull something like that off… and I knew Embries didn’t want to get rid of me for the simple reason that I was still walking around, and I was pretty sure there weren’t two entities with his level of power and influence intimately tied into the school’s administration.

I doubted he would have stood for that kind of competition. I doubted the school would have stood long after it, either.

So it was that after a lot of hemming and hawing and a little bit of sleep that I found myself walking into the waiting room of the mental healing annex. It wasn’t like the waiting area of its physical counterpart… it was an actual lobby. There was a small, contoured wooden desk near one wall, but nobody sitting behind it. The other furniture seemed like something you’d see at a mid-range inn… comfortable-looking chairs with backs and armrests, neither identical to each other nor mismatched.

I didn’t get a chance to find out how comfortable they were, though, because a woman in a purple outfit that looked like something between an exercise suit and pajamas popped into view in far doorway.

“Miss Mackenzie,” she said, smiling blankly and pleasantly. It wasn’t quite a question, but it didn’t sound definite.

“Ms, please,” I said.

“Are you Miss Mackenzie,” she said, still smiling and still not quite asking. Brown bangs moved as she tilted her head slightly, and I glimpsed some indistinct runes. I was too far away to read them and didn’t want to stare, in any event.

“Yes, I’m Mackenzie,” I said. That seemed like a good compromise between causing her distress by giving her an answer she couldn’t deal with and sticking to my wands when it came to biased naming conventions.

“Teddi is waiting for you,” she said. “If you will follow me.”

Her unchanging facial expression was somewhat disconcerting, as was her lack of inflection. Two had a somewhat unmodulated voice, but in her case it wasn’t so much that she couldn’t inflect as she wasn’t acquainted with when and why to do so. This woman’s voice just sounded like she was stuck speaking in a soothing tone, with results that were anything but.

“Have you worked here long?” I asked her as I followed her into a hallway.

“Sometimes,” she said. She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask.

The room she took me to again reminded me more of an inn or lodge than anything else. It was big enough that a somewhat intimate and informal class could have been taught in it, and I supposed that maybe that did happen… skilled subtle artists were rare enough and mental healing was a demanding enough vocation that it seemed likely the professors did double duty.

The golem didn’t follow me inside but just knocked on the doorframe.

“Ms. Mackenzie to see you, Theodora,” she said.

“Thank you, Audra,” a woman said. I hadn’t immediately spotted her because I hadn’t known where to look. She wasn’t behind the big oak desk, or sitting in front of the fireplace, or on any of the chairs. She’d been seated on the floor in the corner, in what I recognized as a meditative position. “Go get some lunch.”

Audra turned and left with an abruptness that would have garnered some words about manners from Two.

“You’ll have to excuse Audra,” Theodora Lundegard said to me. She was wearing a brown tunic-like blouse with some beadwork on the front and a pair of tannish leggings. She had a metal band across her forehead, sort of like a very minimalist crown. There was some kind of crystal set into the middle of it, covered with a network of metal lines. “If she isn’t polite, she also isn’t exactly rude. Her ways are simply inflexible, and they were set by someone who didn’t consider manners to be important in a golem. Also, please call me Teddi… only Audra and my mother call me by my full name.”

“Your mother’s responsible for her ‘ways’?” I guessed.

“Oh, no,” Teddi said. “She tried her best… well, her hardest… to get Audra to behave the way she thinks a servant should. She’s very well-preserved, but she’s from an age when even making golems that looked human was sort of daring. Audra is, I mean.”

“But she eats?”

“And breathes, and sleeps, after a fashion,” Teddi said.

“How long has she been working without a meal break?” I asked.

“We’ve been working since a little bit before noon,” she said. “We had breakfast then. She’s good at filing and things. Please, come in.”

I realized that she was sitting in the middle of a semi-circle of stacks of papers.

“Does she belong to you now?” I asked. My internal debate on whether or not to distrust “Teddi” was not alleviated at all by the revelation that her family owned a golem that was at the very least pre-Republican… and that she was making use of Audra, despite her barely-concealed distaste for her mother.

“To my family,” she said. “I don’t have any power to free her, Ms. Mackenzie, but I believe she’s happier when she can get out and do things.”

“Have you ever thought to ask her what would make her happy?”

“Many times,” Teddi said. “Many times I’ve thought I’d figured out a way to ask her in a way that would make sense to her and that she’d be able to answer. My mother… when she didn’t tell me I was foolish for even wondering… always told me that Audra is always happy, she’s just made that way, but I’ve watched her carefully and I think there’s a difference between when she feels… fulfilled, and when she doesn’t.”

“Well, that’s convenient for you, if you have a lot of filing to do,” I said.

“If I didn’t want Audra, my mother would keep her in the china hutch,” Teddi said. “She only needs to eat when she’s active, and she’d only be taken out to dust herself. I don’t exactly work her fingers to the bone, Ms. Mackenzie, but I don’t let her feel neglected or useless, either. I wonder, do you always care this much about people you’ve just met?”

She got points for saying “people”, but then if she knew anything about me at all she’d know I had a golem for a friend and roommate.

“Not always,” I said. I finally closed the door and began to move nearer to her. “The truth is, I don’t notice most people, individually. But Audra sort of… well, she was standing right in front of me and talking to me. I couldn’t help noticing her. Once I noticed her, I cared.”

“I don’t normally use her as a receptionist,” Teddi said. “But it’s sort of a weird weekend here, and I suspected that you wouldn’t give her any problems so I sent her to fetch you.”

“Were you trying to show me how open-minded you were by hanging out with a golem?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Teddi said. “I had a feeling you might have difficulty opening up to me about your life, so I thought I’d show you something of mine. Audra was my companion, growing up. She did a lot of the raising of me. I can see on your face that you’re trying to imagine what that was like. It wasn’t bad.”

“How much money do your parents have?” I asked. Being raised by a golem nanny was almost a cliche, but I didn’t know that it actually still happened… at least, not among the common folk of the Imperium.

“My parents? Not much,” Teddi said. “My family has a lot of money tied up in land, mines, and various investments. The house I was raised in belongs to a trust. The house I live in today is, too. So does Audra.”

“So only the trustee or trustees could free her.”

“No,” Teddi said, shaking her head. “There are all kinds of protections built in, to make sure the ancestral properties can’t be sold off, the family’s capital can’t be invaded, and the house golems can’t be transferred, sold, or freed. More recently purchased ones have more flexible terms, but the originals… including Audra… are bound to the family.”

“What happens if the family dies out?”

“There are various theories,” Teddi said. “But no one’s really sure.”

Talking about Teddi’s family wasn’t necessarily making me trust her more, or even like her… I couldn’t say that I disliked her, but her background was as alien to me as another plane. I could see the conversation moving smoothly from her background to mine, which was no doubt what she had in mind, but I didn’t want to be distracted from my concerns.

“Isn’t there any paperwork I have to fill out?” I asked. “At the… other place… they won’t even talk to me without giving me a form, any more.”

“Of course,” she said. She rose to her feet. “Would you like to sit down? You can sit anywhere you’d like, I can make myself comfortable anywhere in the room.”

The air temperature was comfortable, but after a moment’s thought I decided to sit in a chair near the fire. I’d never lived anywhere with a fireplace that was in regular use… my grandmother’s house had fireplaces built into some of the rooms, but the chimneys had been blocked off during some modernization and she wasn’t the sort of person to have an illusionary one put in for show. She’d just painted them, bricks and all, like she thought she could paint over a hole in the wall and then used them as little alcoves for knickknacks.

“The fireplace makes you think of something,” Teddi said as I sank into a chair. She sat down on the footstool in front of the one facing it. “Not exactly pleasant, but not unpleasant.”

“My grandmother’s house,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of fond memories of it, but I lived there for nine years. I didn’t come here to talk about her… specifically, I mean.”

“I imagine you have a lot of things on your mind,” she said.

“You have no idea,” I said. “So, what do I have to sign?”

“I made a record for you before you got here,” she said. “That’s all that’s necessary, unless and until we begin any healing. At the moment, we’re just talking. I like to have a bit of an informal chat, so we know what we’re doing with each other, before…”

“I don’t want to do anything informally,” I said. “I want a record.”

“You don’t trust me,” she said. Her face was more responsive than Audra’s, but only just… I could tell that her reactions were deliberately muted instead of non-existent.

“I just wonder if you had some kind of instructions on me,” I said.

“What, like ‘handle with care’?” she asked.

“I just mean… you got back to me awfully quick,” I said. “I wondered if anybody had told you to, you know, be available to me.”

“That’s my job,” she said, as though she would have responded just the same to any other student who reached out in the middle of the night.

“At three in the morning?”

“Not every morning, but I tend to stay up late Friday nights,” she said. “A habit from my student days that I never grew out of. I saw your a-mail right before I went to bed. I knew if it was urgent, you’d be waiting for my reply so I wouldn’t have to wait around to see if you responded. Mackenzie, even if I had been given some instructions concerning you, my priority would still be simply to help you. Not ‘just the same as’ any other student, because you’re not any other student, but neither is anyone else.”

“I didn’t a-mail you, though, I a-mailed the center,” I said.

“It forwards to everyone when there’s no one in the office,” she said.

“And no one else answers messages from a Harlowe girl?”

“If you don’t think you can trust me, I can see that someone else helps you,” Teddi said. “Or I could refer you to someone in town. I’m afraid you’d have to pay, but there is a student rate.”

“I don’t distrust you more than anyone else, at the moment,” I said. It was actually kind of pleasant to talk to her, though I didn’t want to say that just yet. I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, though obviously she knew of me, and she probably knew quite a few specific things about me. “Are you able to read my mind?”

“Possibly, with practice and care,” she said. “If there’s something you want me to delve into your psyche for, we’ll have to do that over the course of many sessions, and I’ll need another healer to act as a… well, spotter, I guess. There is a procedure for it.”

“Have you ever done this… ‘procedure’?”

“Not as such, no,” she said. “We used the technique recently in another situation involving a potentially dangerous mental contact, but it didn’t directly involve a half-demon. We pulled it off successfully.”

“How confident are you that you could do that on my brain without getting hurt?”

“We work on minds, not brains,” Teddi said. “I’m confident that we could stop it before any harm was done, to you or anyone else. I couldn’t promise you results, in other words, but I can promise you safety. Exposing myself to risk isn’t responsible healing. Is there something along those lines that you would like to investigate?”

“No,” I said. “I was just… well, when you said ‘just the same as any other student’, you kind of echoed what I was thinking. I’ve been told that casual contact with my brain… mind… would be bad, so it surprised me.”

“Learning the subtle arts, as they relate to others’ minds, teaches one to read other things,” she said. “Facial cues, body language… and to recognize patterns in thinking even when we can’t see thoughts. I try not to make too many assumptions about what’s going on in a patient’s head, but to a certain extent it just comes naturally… and if you hadn’t been thinking that, well, the phrase wouldn’t have been out of place.”

“Can I ask a question?”

“You may ask any number of questions on any subject that strikes you,” Teddi said.

“That thing on your head… does that do something for your telepathy?”

“It’s a filter of sorts.”

“To block out my infernal nature?” I asked.

“It does that,” she said. “But you know, a filter isn’t the same thing as a wall… we sometimes define filters by what they keep out, but really what distinguishes one filter from another is what it lets through.”

“And what does that one let through?” I asked.

“Emotions, mostly,” she said. “When I’m wearing this, I’m more strongly empathic than I am without it, even as I have less access to thoughts and images. I might use it as a diagnostic tool with any patient, or when someone has privacy concerns but still wants the advantage of my insight.”

“But you have to wear it, around me,” I said. I could see where she was trying to put me at ease by suggesting she wasn’t just wearing it because I was a half-demon, but the fact that there were other reasons she might use it with someone else didn’t actually change the reason she was using it with me.

“If it bothers you, I could take it off,” she said. “But wearing it allows me to relax, and I think I can help you best if I’m relaxed. But if you’d be more comfortable without…”

“I’d rather know that you’re safe,” I said, and she nodded.

“Do you worry about that often?”

“Your safety?”

“People’s safety,” she said. “Other people, I mean. Around you.”

“Maybe not enough sometimes,” I said, thinking back to my hungry spell earlier in the year… and the wacky hijinks with my pitchfork. “I could do a lot of damage, being careless. And I am careless.”

“So have you done much damage?”

“Some.”

“But you’re careful, even with people you’ve just met… people you don’t really trust and aren’t sure you like,” she said.

“I worry,” I said. “I’m not sure that’s the same thing as being careful.”

“You haven’t asked me about a form again,” she said. “Most students are happy to find out they don’t have to fill anything out.”

“Is everything I tell you confidential?”

“With the usual restrictions,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“We live in an Imperial Republic,” she said. “No citizen or agent of the Republic can compel me to breach the bond of confidentiality.”

“But agents of the imperium might,” I said.

“Ordinarily this would be where I would say ‘but I can’t see that happening’.”

“Are you going to say that this time?” I asked.

“I don’t see it happening,” she said.

“You aren’t prescient, are you?”

“Not even a little bit,” she said. “I don’t have to explain what I meant, do I?”

“No,” I said. “I got it.”

“As far as I know, the Law operatives packed up shop and left campus in a hurry the other night,” she said. “Some rather conspicuous blank spots in my awareness disappeared then. And I think the IBF left before them. None of that means there isn’t any official interest in you, but no one’s waiting to rifle through my filing cabinets as soon as you’re gone.”

“Would you tell me if anyone was?”

“I probably wouldn’t be allowed to, but I certainly wouldn’t sit here and tell you otherwise.”

“Even if you were ordered to?”

“I wouldn’t lie for my country,” she said. “And that’s the truth… and, no, that would only be treason if I were actually being ordered to do so by a duly-appointed imperial authority. Otherwise it’s…”

“…empty defiance, which is protected in the Bill of Prohibitions,” I said. “I wasn’t actually thinking that it was treason.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, sometimes I guess wrong. You seem like the sort of person who has a lot of… for authority.”

“A lot of what?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m used to being able to fill in gaps by projecting things and letting the listener’s mind fill in a word that fits to them. You don’t respect authority, exactly, but the way you behave towards it is quite a bit like the way someone who does would.”

“I obey authority, you mean?”

“I was aiming for more of an emotional connotation,” she said.

“You aren’t used to communicating with someone without using telepathy,” I said.

“Imagine you found yourself suddenly lacking a letter,” she said. “One letter. Maybe not the most commonly used one, but there are only twenty-seven letters in the alphabet. How many letters, besides the sacred one, could you carry on a conversation without using? A vowel would trip you up immediately. A consonant might take longer for you to feel the lack… say you lost Q, for instance. You might be able to talk for a while without stumbling, but then something happens and quite quickly you find yourself in trouble.”

“So most of the time when you’re talking to someone, they think you’re saying things that you’re not actually saying?”

“But I am saying it,” she said. “If I could just think at someone with something like this is what you need to hear from me and have their mind sort it out, my job would be easier but a lot less satisfying. Whatever someone ‘hears’ from me, I am saying it to them, whether they’re hearing with their ears first or their mind.”

“It’s different with me, though?”

“Not in a bad way,” she said.

“I don’t want to be someone’s special challenge,” I said.

“Every patient is a special challenge,” she said.

“I think you know what I mean.”

“You were raised human,” Teddi said. “You’re a basically shy person. You’re Magisterian, and if you didn’t grow up on the plains, you grew up in the wetlands or the edge of the badlands. Pax is your native language. If we didn’t have similar childhoods, we at least have a frame of reference for each other. Your mind is essentially mammalian, and you think one thing in one direction and dimension at the same speed that I think. Ms. Mackenzie, whatever minor… interface… problems we have with each other, you are not my special challenge for this semester, believe me.”

I blushed at that. There I was, more or less assuming that the sphere revolved around me alone… I really should have known better. She was seeing Steff and any other student in Harlowe who felt like having his or her thoughts examined.

“It’s not just the demon thing,” I said. “I mean, I think maybe a lot of what I want to talk to you about ties back in that, but I don’t think it’s just the, you know, practical problems that presents that might be a challenge.”

“I expect so,” Teddi said.

“There are some things I can’t talk about,” I said. “They’re… pretty big.”

“Are these things we should be working on talking about, or things we should be working around talking about?” she asked without missing a beat.

“Around,” I said.

“Alright, then,” she said. “It’s your time, Ms. Mackenzie… if you understand that you’re going to be spending more of it to make less progress and you still say you can’t talk about what’s bothering you, then I have no objection.”

“I’m not saying that just to be difficult,” I said.

“I’m not, either,” she said. “I mean it. If there’s something you can’t talk about, we’ll work around it. It will slow us down, but slow progress is still progress.”

“When do we start?” I asked.

“Well, you really do have excellent timing… I’m free the whole rest of the afternoon,” she said. “Though that means we will need to get the paperwork squared away.”

“You don’t have any other appointments?”

“I did, but I canceled them,” she said. “No, not because of you.” That time she was spot-on. “I canceled them yesterday because I wanted a chance to get my files back in order, but you seem to prefer a little distance for now and I don’t think you’ll take offense or think I’m not paying attention if I’m sorting while we’re talking.”

“Something happened to get your files out of order?” I said.

“I couldn’t possibly say,” she said. “But I can say you do have excellent timing, Ms. Mackenzie.”

“Do you always address your patients formally?”

“Usually, I can pick up on a patient’s preference after trying it once,” she said. “You’ll have to tell me if you prefer something else.”

I thought about it. The “Ms. Mackenzie” thing was making me feel too much like I was in a classroom, or that I’d been called into someone’s office. But I was kind of hesitant to just ask her to drop it… the people who called me Mackenzie were among the people who knew me best and the ones who knew me least. I thought about Dee’s habit of introducing herself.

“Call me Mack, please,” I said. I felt in some way as though I was trying the name on for size. “For now.”

“Okay, Mack,” she said. “If you’ll move over to the desk very briefly, we’ll get you signed in and have a little talk about goals and then we’ll begin.”

There were some digressions into serious topics. Dee, in particular, seemed pensive. I pointedly put off any talk about the distant future, i.e., our plans for the summer or next year. Anything much further past tomorrow was too far away for me to deal with at the moment.

This sort of inevitably led to lulls in the conversation, though, and the silence was more than just deafening… it was suffocating. It crept in through the corners of my mind like shadows in the corner of a room and threatened to drown me.

“I think that we should play a game,” Two announced in one of those lulls, to my immense gratitude. Under other circumstances, I might have wondered about what Two’s idea of a game was. She was very good at rules, but less acquainted with fun. “That is what people do at parties.”

Steff had a look on her face and I knew she was just aching to suggest something like spin-the-bottle… or some equivalent that had actually been played by people in the last twenty years… but she wouldn’t so long as Two was there.

I didn’t think she necessarily wanted to kiss Ian or Dee, but she wouldn’t mind making either of them uncomfortable at the prospect.

“What kind of game would you like to play?” Amaranth asked.

Two looked around the room.

“We could play musical chairs,” she said. “But we would have to take turns because there are only two chairs in here.”

I was glad that no one else was particularly keen on that idea, because I knew Two would shut down any suggestion to bring more furniture in, as that was against the dorm rules. An argument with Two wasn’t ever really much of an argument, both because she couldn’t easily be swayed on a point like that and because she wouldn’t nurse a grudge afterwards, but I didn’t want to have to listen to even that sort of politely stubborn dispute at the moment.

“Well… how about truth or dare?” Ian said. “I mean, that doesn’t require any furniture or equipment.”

“I don’t feel that we should be encouraging any risky behavior,” Amaranth said. “Also, I’ve seen that game turn mean-spirited really quickly, when you have people with different levels of boundaries.”

I didn’t doubt that she had… Amaranth traveled in the widest social circles of all of us, probably followed by Two, and she was the one most likely to end up in a room where truth-or-dare was being played.

I didn’t feel jealous to consider this, exactly. That is to say, I didn’t feel jealous of the people who had shared those experiences with Amaranth, those people who had shared Amaranth.

I did feel a little twinge of envy for Amaranth herself, though. I hadn’t exactly wanted to come to college and play truth-or-dare then have sex with everyone in the room, but the whole going out and doing things and meeting people… I’d expected more of that to happen.

“Ah, it’s not like anybody here would do a dare just to be mean,” Steff said. “We’re all friends here.”

“I’d like to keep it that way,” Amaranth said. “And that means keeping anyone from doing anything they regret later… and that includes making someone else do or say something they don’t want to.”

“Okay, how about two truths and a lie?” Ian said. “That way no one has to share anything they don’t want to. No pressure.”

“This game is of a confessional nature?” Dee asked.

“Sort of,” Amaranth said. “I suppose it can be… it’s really more of an icebreaker, usually. When it’s your turn, you say three things about yourself, two of which are true and the other one is a lie. The others try to guess which is the lie. And the one who guesses goes next, or else we can just go in a circle. I’ve read about it being done both ways.”

“Is there a winner?” Dee asked.

“We could keep score, I suppose, but not usually,” Amaranth said. “It’s a fun, getting-to-know-you sort of thing.”

“Interesting,” Dee said. “It puts me in mind of some of the exercises we performed during our pre-initiation stages. There, though, the goal was as much about self-knowledge and personal revelation as it was about communicating anything to others.”

“Guys, I hate to be the downer, but I’m really not sure I’m in the mood for revelations,” I said. “This just isn’t the night for that kind of game.”

“Well, maybe we should make tomorrow night game night,” Amaranth said. “That way we’ll have time to think up some things that we can all enjoy.”

“Stone soldiers?” Ian and Steff said at the same time.

“I’m not sure that everyone is equally interested in war games,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, come on, Amy,” Steff said. “It’s really right up Mack’s alley if she’d just give it a try.” She looked at me. “I mean, there’s the historical aspect…”

“History is more than just a series of battles,” I said. “I’m not actually that interested in military history in particular.”

“Right, but there’s also a strong fantasy aspect,” she said.

“Maybe we’ll give it a try,” I said. I really wasn’t too interested, but if nothing else, talking about it had filled the gap. Being annoyed over the war game fad that was spreading through the campus was better than the alternative, and it wasn’t like I was even all that deeply annoyed. This was a familiar sort of annoyance, and it was a pleasing familiarity.

It reminded me of trudging up the hill towards my house, when I was a little kid… I’d hated that hill, but I’d loved the feeling of trudging up it because it meant I was going home.

There was a thought worming its way around in the back of my brain, though, now that the subject of personal revelations had come up. I’d planned on seeing a mental healer that weekend, if possible. I hadn’t sent the a-mail inquiry yet for obvious reasons. The question was, would there be any point? It seemed like I could use that kind of help even more… but now on top of whatever difficulties my heritage posed to a subtle artist, there was a big glaring hole in the fabric of things that I really needed to talk to someone about.

But on the other hand, it wasn’t like my other issues actually were any smaller or less important even if they were metaphorically dwarfed by the events in the basement office. So, when the conversation began to run out of impetus the next time, I was the one who spoke into the stretching silence.

“I was going to send an a-mail to the mental healing center,” I said. “See if they can see me this weekend.”

“They do take walk-ins,” Steff said. “I mean, on the weekend you might be waiting for a while, depending on when exactly you walk in, but they don’t turn anyone away, as long as you’ve got a student ID.”

“I believe that’s exactly what Mackenzie is concerned about,” Dee said. “Being turned away.”

“Well, that is sort of always in the back of my head,” I said. “The fear that I’ll be turned away, I mean… except when it’s in the front of it. But I just… well, I want it to go smoothly.”

“They’re professionals, Mack,” Steff said. “You’re not going to be the first person they’ve dealt with who has freaky things going on inside her head. I mean, there’s got to be students with elemental natures, statistically… probably most of them are from families that have counted themselves as human for generations, so it’s not like the staff will have so much as an asterisk after a name to warn them.”

“Still, I’d rather they have the warning than not,” I said. “I’m not really interested in testing the abilities of a given healer to roll with punches, you know?”

“If it makes you feel better to have an appointment, then you should do that,” Amaranth said. “I mean, there’s got to be a limit to what anyone can do for you if you’re not comfortable with the process, right?”

“I believe that is an accurate summation,” Dee said. “It required more than one session before I was able to make any progress. Though part of that may be that my healer was strangely uncomfortable with nudity for someone who deals with people so intimately.”

“Well, I’ll try to keep my clothes on,” I said.

“Why don’t you go ahead and send the a-mail now?” Amaranth suggested.

“It’s the middle of the night,” I said.

“And tomorrow it will be the middle of the day,” she said. “This way, it’ll be waiting for them when they get in, first thing in the morning, and maybe you can get an answer that much quicker instead of having it hanging over your head all day.”

“I suppose so,” I said, and I took out my mirror. There was no question of going downstairs to use one of the gazing balls in the first floor ballroom… the Law goons had vacated the premises too recently for it to really feel like it was part of Harlowe and not some foreign embassy of officialdom.

I composed a message that I hoped was both polite and to the point. After some quick edits to get rid of some ellipses and otherwise clean it up, I sent off the following:

Hi. My name is Mackenzie Blaise and I am a freshman student who is having some issues I would like to talk about. I have some special needs due to extraplanar heritage that may affect my treatment. Would it be possible for me to come in some time this weekend to talk to someone?

Thank you.

I had been torn about leaving it at “extraplanar”, but realistically I probably could have just said my name and left it at that… it wasn’t like they would have read “Mackenzie Blaise, the half-demon” and gone, “Oh, so you’re that Mackenzie Blaise.”

“Well, that’s done,” I said. I’d only just snapped the mirror’s case shut when it let out a delicate chime that I’d never heard before. I almost dropped it… or rather, I did drop it, but Dee’s hand ended up between it and the floor. She handed it back to me without a word. “Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

I opened the mirror back up and discovered that chime meant I had a priority message waiting for me. It said:

All students are welcome in our center, Ms. Mackenzie. What time would suit you best?

Regards,
Theodora Lundegard, CMH, Ph.SA

I stared at it like I expected it to explode, except I was actually expecting something much worse. Maybe I was feeling a bit paranoid, but paranoia was not necessarily an irrational response after having demons and cannibalistic slavers and person-eating monsters and government agents taking such an interest in me in such a short amount of time. An instant reply at what was… if anything about the message could be trusted… close to three in the morning?

I felt a fleeting urge to reflect to Lee and see what he thought about it, except that it was three in the morning. I supposed I had my excuse to talk to him in the morning proper, though.

“Is something wrong, baby?” Amaranth asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just… that was an awfully fast reply.”

“Don’t you think they have someone on duty twenty-four hours a day?” Amaranth asked. “If not in general, then… well, now?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said. “Do any of you guys know anything about a Theodora Lundegard?”

I did my best not to look right at Steff when I said it, which was my impulse. It wasn’t just that she went to the center herself… Dee did, too. Steff was the one who knew the staff of the physical healing center, and so my mind leaped to her… but I knew what it would look like.

“Yeah, she’s pretty much the official unofficial Harlowe healer now,” Steff said. “Both because her colleagues don’t want to have anything to do with us if they can avoid it, and because no one here wants to talk to anyone else more than once.”

“Is it really that bad?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine either branch of the healing center being terribly blatant about discrimination, given how such featured in my case against the school.

“Well, what’s ‘that bad’?” Steff asked. “I don’t mean they meet you at the door with a pitchfork and a torch… but, well… imagine how easy it is to open up to someone who can’t quite bring themselves to look at you, or who only wants to talk about your issues in terms of how you’re ‘adjusting’, or who responds to everything by shaking her head and apologizing and saying that she doesn’t really know that much about ‘you people’. Or someone who’s earnestly excited over everything you say because she’s always wanted a chance to treat one of ‘you people’.”

“Did you really go through all that?” I asked.

“No,” Steff said. “I got Teddi on the first go-round. But I’ve heard some of it from other people, and… well…”

She shrugged, like she couldn’t quite put into words what she was thinking, and was surprised at the need to.

“It is not difficult to extrapolate the sorts of difficulties people of all sorts may encounter in all situations where they are marginalized, once one has experienced some of them in some situations,” Dee said.

“Yeah, what she said,” Steff said.

“My experiences with Ms. Lundegard have been mostly positive, after some brief uncertainty over the issue of dress, and barring her unfortunate tendency to ascribe guilty feelings to situations in which I hold myself blameless,” Dee said. “But she means well, and she has helped me for all that.”

“She makes you call her ‘Ms. Lundegard’?” Steff asked.

“No,” Dee said. “But I am not addressing her, and I gather that she has introduced herself to Mackenzie using her full name. I find it likely she will grant permission to use the familiar form herself, but I would not presume to do so for her.”

“But you two trust her?” I asked. “There isn’t… you don’t think she’d be working for someone else? I don’t mean the university or the center, or whoever ordinarily signs her paycheck… I mean, the Law guys might have pulled out of here but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be interested in things that happen on campus.”

“Oh, Mack, she’s probably just got insomnia,” Steff said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the things she sees in her patients’ heads keep her up all night. I have a feeling that some of her patients have tried to think really disturbing things at her to see how easily she could be shaken up before they were comfortable telling her certain things.”

“I am confident that you can trust in her discretion,” Dee said. “She has a tendency to wonder about the physical logistics of intimate encounters involving more than two participants, but it isn’t something she would voice aloud even if you were to somehow notice her thinking that and invite her to ask her questions.”

“Wait… so, you’ve been in her mind?” I said..

“We have… overlapped, I suppose would be the best term. Most telepathic contact between telepaths is bilateral, to a degree,” Dee said.

“And you trust her, after seeing into her mind?” I asked.

“I trusted her before, obviously.”

That all sounded like good news… well, it wasn’t good news that there was only one mental healer servicing the campus who would see Harlowe residents and treat them with dignity, but it was good news that this one healer and not another one had popped up to answer my a-mail at three in the morning. That made a trap of some kind a bit less likely.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll go for the afternoon, in case I need to crash out and get some sleep.”

I sent back a reply asking her if I could come in and talk at three-thirty, and got a reply under a minute later saying that she would look forward to seeing me then.

“So that’s that, then,” I said. “I’m seeing a mental healer.”

Soon: Mackenzie vs. Teddi in the epic throw-down grudgematch YOU demanded talks about what bothers her.

I braced myself for all of the questions I wouldn’t be able to answer, the anger and confusion that would surely follow my silence… I’d felt smaller than I’d ever imagined I could in front of Embries, but it seemed to me like I was shrinking by the minute even still.

When I’d left the room I had felt somewhat in control, for once in my life. I hadn’t had a plan, exactly, but I had made up my own mind and taken action. Maybe it had been the only course of action available to me, but I had chosen to face it on my own rather than be dragged into it kicking and screaming.

Now the threat posed by Iona had been ended and the possibility of further repercussions for me seemed to be getting smaller and smaller… and yet I felt completely vulnerable and caught in an out-of-control spiral.

Worse, I could feel the eyes on me… Amaranth’s, and Ian’s, and Steff’s, and Two’s, and Dee’s. Any eyes would have been bad at that moment, but the weight of my friends’ stares was more than I could bear. In the weeks since I’d first come to MU, I’d been thrust into the center of attention enough times that I could bear it even if I didn’t enjoy it, but I couldn’t meet the gazes of these people who loved me and trusted me, who’d rallied behind me and stood up for me more times than I could count

Maybe it seemed sad that having even less than a half a dozen people I felt so close to… who I could trust and who trusted me in turn… seemed to me to represent an embarrassing excess of both love and luck, but it did. Maybe it was sad… maybe I was sad.

I knew they were looking at me expectantly, waiting with patience I hadn’t earned for me to elaborate or explain. I lifted my eyes to Amaranth, hoping that from her at least I could plead for some understanding… and discovered that I didn’t have to. Where I’d thought to see expectation, there was only concern.

Gradually I looked around and saw much the same thing on the faces of the others. They were all waiting to see if I would say anything else, if I was finished, but nobody was about to demand that I spilled my guts or narrated the whole thing right then and there.

Of course, it seemed obvious in retrospect… they’d all come together for my sake in the first place. If the whole situation had been a plotline on a TV show or something that happened to a distant someone else, any one of them might have wanted answers first and foremost because the mystery, the uncertainty, would have been their only stake in the matter. They had to be curious, but that was a small matter compared to the relief they felt at seeing me and hearing that it was over.

The problem was, they still looked anxious… if anybody had been in a chair, they would have been on the edge of their seat.

“It’s going to be okay,” I added. “I’m sorry, that’s really all I can say.”

That’s really all I can say I felt a twinge of falling back into old habits with that, as it felt a lot like the way I’d used to step around the truth without technically lying. That wasn’t what I was trying to do… I just wanted to let everyone know that they could let out the breaths they were holding. I couldn’t say with any certainty that I was or would be okay, but the thing was over, it was over and done with. What had happened wasn’t okay, would never be okay… but things in general could only get better.

A lifetime passed in a few moments, then a logjam broke inside of Amaranth and she threw herself forward, flinging her arms and tears over me.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said. “McAvoy said it was best that I forget I ever knew you. I told him… I told him that even… well, I said I was better for knowing you, my life was better and I was better and that I wouldn’t forget you no matter what.”

Amaranth wasn’t exactly a dainty little flower, but the words bowled me over more than the impact or her unfiltered sobs. She sounded so defiant when she said, and proud of it to the point that I could almost believe she meant it… but on some level, I’d always figured I was something of a fixer-up project for Amaranth.

“Why would you say something like that?” I asked her. I didn’t doubt that Amaranth loved me, but it seemed to me like our relationship was rooted in how she made me better. I knew she wasn’t perfect in any except a purely physical sense, but I couldn’t imagine how my presence in her life could improve it or her.

“Because it’s true, baby,” Amaranth said. “Being with you… loving you, owning you… it’s the first real thing I’ve ever had to be concerned about. The first immediate thing, I should say… the things I’ve read about and thought about are real, but there really is a difference between making an intellectual stand and actually committing to something, or someone. I have to think about things more… well, I mean, I’ve always thought about things, but now, with a real person, there are consequences if I’m wrong, and I can’t afford to be wrong…”

“Hey,” Ian said, coming up behind her and putting a hand on her shoulder. “We’re just kids, you know?”

“I’m not,” Amaranth sobbed.

“How long have you been out in the world?” he said. “You’re a fucking precocious newborn.”

“Or a precocious fucking one,” Steff said. “You guys want to come in out of the gossip? You’ll catch your death of Trina out there.”

We drew into the room and Ian shut the door behind us. There was something like a shift in the atmosphere when the door closed. With no predator out there specifically after one of us and no Law agents lurking around, the room felt a bit like a sanctuary again.

Okay, as far as I knew Feejee was still out there, there were plenty of people who hated me, and the room wasn’t any more private or secure than it ever had been… but it was like coming in from a very cold place to one that was only kind of warm. The fact that it was warmer was all you cared about.

Actually, that was a pretty good description of what it was like to come back to my room in the winter.

“Here,” Ian said, pulling out my desk chair. “You look like you need to sit down.”

“I do, thanks,” I said, but I guided Amaranth to it and then took my place at her feet. We both needed to sit down, and we needed comfort, and we needed each other… her as much as me.

“Thank you, baby,” Amaranth said.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

Ian handed me my mirror.

“We couldn’t get through to anyone, but I bet it’ll work now. You should probably try to get a hold of Lee, I guess,” he said. “He’ll be worried. And maybe he can explain a few things.”

I started to open the compact, then shook my head and put it up on my desk.

“I’ll contact him about something else to let him know I’m okay tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t know if he’s going to get in trouble for trying to warn me or anything, but I think maybe we should leave him with whatever shred of plausible deniability he might have. And thank you for your help, everyone… it means a lot.”

“Collectively, we accomplished nothing,” Dee said, and I had another random insight: everyone in the room, except maybe for Two, felt as inadequate as I did. They didn’t know what I’d been through but even if they couldn’t begin to imagine how bad it was, they knew it wasn’t good and that I’d faced it alone.

“You were willing to help,” I said. “That’s enough.”

“Through circumstances beyond our control, our help was unnecessary,” Dee said. “That is not quite the same thing. I told myself that I was not able to follow where you went… there was too much scrutiny on your movements, and not enough cover away from the building.” Her head dipped, and I saw shame in the gesture. “The truth is that I lost my nerve… I do not trust my ability to remain undetected, moving under a starry sky.”

“You tried,” I said. Telling her that she wouldn’t have been able to make it inside even if she had been able to follow us to our destination probably wouldn’t have been the best way to make her feel less inadequate, so instead I just said, “You gave me some idea of what I was heading towards. I don’t think anyone else could have done more.”

“I suppose not,” she said. “But your distress is palpable to me, and I regret that I did not try harder. I do not believe I would have suffered any worse consequences than expulsion and repatriation, had I been caught interfering.”

“I don’t know if I’d count on that,” Ian said. “Law doesn’t mess around, and I don’t think they’re fans of your people.”

“I can’t imagine why they shouldn’t be,” Dee said. “We are an exceptionally orderly people. Chaos is a luxury we can ill-afford. They should be more concerned with Steff’s kin, who manufacture chaos as an antidote to too-long life.”

“Yeah, they really probably should,” Steff said. “But you live in dark caverns far away from where any human’s ever explored, which makes you chaotic by default.”

“How?”

“Because they don’t know what you’re up to,” Steff said. “They probably don’t know what we’re up to, either, not as much as they’d like to but we’re pretty to look at and make a convenient buffer against the more overtly nasty things in the woods.” She shrugged. “Law. Chaos. It’s all politics, really. If someone wanted to overthrow the Imperium, they’d call that chaotic even if it was to replace the system with something more orderly.”

“In any event, given the shows of power Ceilos made on behalf of her students in recent days, I doubt I would have been met with lethal force,” Dee said. “I have no excuse for not trying.”

“Yeah, but even if you just got yourself expelled, don’t you imagine your goddess would be kind of pissed?” Steff said. “You said you’re here because you think it’s her will.”

“I do not know the reason that I was meant to be here,” Dee said. “I could be meant to serve a greater role in events such as this.”

“Do you really think you were meant to help me?” I asked.

“Specifically? It does not strike me as the most likely course of events, but it seems no more particularly unlikely to me than the idea that she should send me forth on behalf of any other person,” Dee said. “Perhaps I am meant to be more… pro-active in general. If I am called to serve any leadership role in my house or chapel, perhaps I should learn to lead now.”

“Or maybe you should take off your clothes more often,” Steff said. “I mean, that can only help.”

“You did fine, Dee,” Amaranth said, sniffling. “I was the useless one… I think the agents really believed I could bring Mother Khaele forth to do vengeance or something, but it was like it didn’t matter. They were worried about it but it wouldn’t have changed anything even if it was true.”

“It was bigger than them,” I said. “They got their orders from higher up… I don’t think anyone here could have changed what was going to happen, no matter what we used to convince them. But you weren’t useless… I don’t think I would have been able to walk down there without you by my side… and I don’t think I would have even bothered trying to protect myself if I hadn’t met you. Hell, I might have died or been arrested or expelled for something before now if I didn’t have you.”

“You say that, I haven’t exactly kept you out of trouble,” she said.

“Yeah, but can you imagine how much more trouble I might have got into if I was still under Puddy’s thumb?” I asked. “If not for you, I might feel like I had to accept any attention I could get, no matter who it was from or what it cost me. You knew what I was almost from the beginning and you didn’t care. That meant a lot, Amaranth.”

It was weird for me to be reassuring her and Dee, but I was reassuring myself in the process… I wasn’t alone. I had friends. They cared for me and looked out for me.

“You know, when I first learned what you were, I didn’t have to think twice about standing up for you because I’d already thought about it so many times before. Not half-demons specifically, or you in particular, but… well, I was petty sure that I was going to be amazingly tolerant of every race before I met anyone who wasn’t a member of a really pretty widely-accepted race.”

“And you were right,” I said. “You are. Amaranth, I couldn’t ask for someone more understanding than you…”

“I’m not, though,” she said. “I wasn’t… I didn’t understand anything. I thought I could just, you know, smile and tell you that it wasn’t a big deal… and everyone else would follow my lead. I mean, I think I’m well-liked enough, and I’m well-read and pretty smart… and racial prejudices are so silly and backwards, I thought I could show people a more reasonable alternative and that would be all it would take. Like, no one ever thought of that before or something.”

“Okay, that is pretty patronizing,” Steff said. “But it could be worse… you could be one of those people who thinks because there’s sometimes a hobgoblin in a TV show and we don’t have thrice daily lynchings that there isn’t any more racism. Or you could be Shiel.”

“I do not believe Shiel espouses those positions,” Dee said.

“No, but she bugs the crap out of me,” Steff said. “Partly because she reminds me of me a year ago. What I’m saying is, there are some much worse froshes than you.”

“What the hell is that, anyway?” Ian asked. “The past tense of ‘to fresh’?”

“It means first year,” Steff said.

“I know what it means, I just don’t see how it makes sense,” Ian said. “Etymologically. If you don’t want to say ‘men’, why not just ‘fresh’? It’s like somebody’s pointless in-joke somehow got turned into the PC term.”

“I don’t know,” Steff said. She shrugged. “I latched onto it because it beats being called any kind of a man all the time. A word’s origins don’t have to make sense as long as the word does.”

“I suppose,” Ian said. “I mean, what the hell does ‘sophomore’ even mean?”

“‘Wise fool’,” I said. “From the Elvish, ‘sophos’ and ‘moros’.”

“Actually, that’s a myth,” Amaranth said, regaining her composure a bit. “It just means someone who’s grown in wisdom. It was only a few hundred years ago that the spelling became standardized as ‘-omore‘, and the connection to ‘moros‘ arose later as a folk etymology.”

“Actually, you’re both wrong,” Steff said. “It’s from the old Elvish words ‘sophom’, meaning ‘your first album’, and ‘oros‘, meaning ‘was way better‘.

“I didn’t do anything, either,” Two said, in the tone of voice a small child might have used to say I helped, too! We all laughed, even Dee. “I didn’t,” Two said, frowning slightly.

“Yes, Two,” I said. “I know you didn’t… and I appreciate it.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“You can do me next,” Steff said. “But I don’t need any reassurance.”

“Are you really okay?” Ian asked.

“I don’t know… I’ll have to think about that,” I said. “I mean, I’m alive… I made it through. I’m with you guys. I don’t think… I mean, I might not have very pleasant dreams for a while, and there’s a good chance I might break down crying before the weekend is over…”

“Then it’s a good thing we’re having a slumber party,” Steff said. It had been her idea to put that happy face on our gathering in the first place, back when the reason for it had been to lie low and avoid Iona. I wasn’t surprised at all that she was the one who was quickest to joke, or that she steered us back towards our original purpose. If anybody had asked me if I was up for company, I might have said no… but really the last thing I wanted was to be alone, or to have nothing to do or think or talk about but the thing I couldn’t mention. “Nobody sleeps during those anyway, so, you know, any nightmares are going to have to wait their turn.”

“And, baby, you’ll always be able to talk to us about it, when you’re ready to,” Amaranth said, reaching down to me. I climbed up onto her lap, grateful for the gesture and the closeness even as her words sunk in.

I wouldn’t be able to. I couldn’t. No matter how well-meaning Amaranth was, how understanding she wanted to be, she couldn’t help me. No matter how willing she was to listen, I couldn’t tell her.

But… she was willing. Could knowing that be enough? Probably not, but it was something.

“Thank you,” I said. “I want you to know that even if I never tell you, it means a lot… and also, it’s not because I don’t want to.”

“Do you still want pizza?” Amaranth said. “I think Steff has the right idea… if you’re up for it, we should just go ahead with our plans.”

My stomach gave a twist. It had been sorely abused during and immediately after the events in Embries’s office. The thought of eating anything ever again seemed unthinkable, the possibility of me being able to stomach any solid food or stand to feel my teeth gnashing and tearing into anything after what I’d seen seemed impossibly remote.

I could get by without actually eating, but the others couldn’t… and if I wasn’t eating myself, then I’d be watching, and in a way that would be worse. Also, the time would come when I would have to feed, and even if I could do that without using my teeth… for an instant, I saw two roads stretched out before me. One led to an endless future of consuming nothing but human blood, tasting nothing that had not been inside another person, nothing that was not part of another person. The other began with pizza with friends. It passed through some of the same destinations, but it was a much more attractive route… once the initial uphill portion was passed.

“Sure,” I said, smiling as well as I could. “Pizza sounds good.”

And with those words, forced as they were, the rest of my life began.

Soon: The rest of Mackenzie’s life continues.

I still felt…

The whole thing had been…

I couldn’t even…

I headed straight out from the front of the building with no clear plan or goal in sight. My head was reeling and spinning with images of… images that I didn’t have any way to deal with. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. The only clear thought I had in my head was to get away. If I’d thought that I could somehow get away from everybody, I would have. I didn’t want to see anyone… especially not my friends and especially not Amaranth, after… that.

Running off into the woods wasn’t an option, though. Even in my desperation, I knew that was not a good idea. The lie about a wandering monster killing Leda had been founded on more than one shade of truth. There were places I could go to be alone on campus, but while they would have been away from people, they wouldn’t be away. Standing out in the open air, I felt as exposed, as vulnerable, as a rabbit scurrying across an empty plain. Finding some empty corner of the library probably wouldn’t be any better.

The carriage park was right there. If there had been a school coach arriving or waiting at the stop, I probably would’ve hopped on without a second thought, or even a first one. Enwich was full of people, but nobody I knew, and even if the quiet and secluded parts were probably not the safest place to be, the worst thing that could happen to me there was I’d be killed.

There wasn’t any such vehicle conveniently waiting to take me away, though, and there was no way I was going to stand around in the cold night on the east end of campus, with the admin building tucked just out of sight.

I headed back to Harlowe. What else could I do? It wasn’t a safe place, I knew that. It wasn’t secure. I wasn’t beyond the reach of anyone there, especially not a university administrator who also just happened to be a living, breathing… emphasis on breathing… survivor of the primal age of creation, as Embries almost certainly was.

Great dragons couldn’t do those things. Not the… I was pretty sure they could do that, and wasn’t interested in learning any more on the subject. It was the imposition of will that I was thinking about. I wasn’t an expert on the abilities of dragons in particular but I was almost sure that merely great dragons couldn’t do anything like that.

They had imposing presence, yeah. They would surely inspire the primal fear and awe that Embries had talked about. They could probably, under the right circumstances and when dealing with the right mind, compel obedience.

But they weren’t so strong-willed as to be able to give a god pause, and that estimation of Embries’s power based on his wards seemed a lot less hyperbolic than it might have to someone who hadn’t been standing in his unmasked presence. A greater dragon was technically beneath a god, but there were stories… historical accounts, even… of greater dragons obliterating a god’s physical form in combat.

They weren’t detailed accounts. The stories could be full of flourishes, but in terms of actual verifiable detail, all that could be ascertained was who had come back from the fight wearing a body and how many miles around had been devastated in the process.

Even the remotest divination of a battle like that wasn’t very safe.

Thinking about this… about the fact that there was a greater dragon not only living in the area but apparently running the school… well, it didn’t make me feel better, exactly. It stopped me from feeling worse, from continuing to spiral down the whirlpool of images that filled my brain and that I had no hope of releasing.

I couldn’t deal with what I’d seen, what I’d been made to witness. Could I deal with the fact that there was a dragon… a greater dragon… on campus? That I’d felt his will clamp down like… like something I really didn’t want to employ as a metaphor at the moment… on my mind?

Maybe… given time.

I had felt the mammal’s hereditary fear of dragons before, albeit at a distant remove… but “Mama Blackwater”, as we called our province’s most famous resident, was lazy and unambitious and much more concerned about the doings of other dragons than anything else. Where Embries was disturbingly vital and active in his advanced age, she seemed more old and tired than ancient and terrible.

There was a treaty between the Imperium and her, as there had to be with Embries… though hers was publicly known and celebrated. The Blackwater Compact was a big part of the Province Day festivities. The fact that the compact named the province after her (or after her most widely-known epithet) had done a lot to placate her draconic sense of vanity, and the fee she was paid out of the budget as a royalty on the name (because the Imperial Republic of Magisteria does not pay tribute to any sovereign power, of course) did even more to convince her that letting a bunch of humans come into her land and set up the trappings of their empire was not so bad a thing.

The news occasionally reported on her movements or cautiously sought her out for commentary on local events… there would sometimes be a stir when she was spotted flying north of her more usual haunts to the south of the border of the human-settled lands. Mostly, she just wanted to be left alone… I mean, you couldn’t think about your house being under a dragon’s potential flight path and not shiver… but you got used to it.

People got used to living in places with heavy elemental activity, or on unsecured borders with hostile races. Blackwater and the lands to the south of it were dragon country, to the point where it had seemed strange to me that Prax was free of them.

Dragons of any size weren’t common… they were the product of an earlier age and their numbers had never done anything but dwindle. But they weren’t exactly rare, and their territories tended to be so large that the only time an area was truly free of them was when a concerted (and costly and dangerous) effort had been made to clear the area of them, and then to keep it clear.

The remaining intelligent dragons on the east coast, for instance, were either deep underground or completely assimilated. Lesser ones were either domesticated or held in captivity.

Outside the imperial boundaries? There wasn’t a square inch of the badlands to the west that weren’t claimed as territory by an intelligent dragon or inhabited by some of their lesser kin. There were known to be a host of reds and a few noble dragons of various shades and magnitudes up and down the Wall of the World to the west… one of them was probably the bad neighbor that Embries had mentioned.

And of course, that explained the hole in the dragon range map that was Prax. Some greater dragons allowed kin to lair within their lands, like vassals under a monarch, but it didn’t seem like Embries was the type to enjoy that particular form of flattery. He didn’t like to share.

I supposed my altered smell was probably a saving grace. I didn’t know if things would have turned out differently if not for the potion I’d taken… but I could imagine this one encounter turning into an ongoing interest of exactly the kind I didn’t need any more of, if I’d gone in there smelling like my usual self.

When I got back to Harlowe, I found it seemed that the Law men had withdrawn. At the very least, there weren’t any policing the downstairs hallway. I didn’t go down into the basement lounge to see if they’d given Gwendolyn’s office back. She wasn’t lurking in the stairs any longer. I felt a layer of unreality settling over the whole thing, like it hadn’t really happened.

I wasn’t able to fool myself into believing this, but the feeling was welcome all the same.

I would need to figure out how to deal with this… how to handle what I’d seen, and what I knew, and I would need to figure out how to do it alone. I couldn’t tell Amaranth or Ian. I couldn’t relate it to a mental healer. I could look for a way around it, but I probably wouldn’t find one and it might be dangerous to try.

He’d known when I’d been fighting his influence… he’d known before I’d realized it.

Climbing the stairs, I felt an increasing dread at the thought of seeing my friends… not just because of what I’d seen before, but also because I didn’t know what to tell them. I didn’t know what I could tell them. Short of having someone sharing my soul and letting me know what they see so I could find the discrepancies, I didn’t know where exactly the limits were, and as I’d said it would be dangerous to test them.

Embries hadn’t just been bragging or displaying an arrogant contempt for other orders of creation when he’d said his power wasn’t like faerie magic. In a true geas, the restrictions on me would be sharply outlined according to the exact words used to place it. That wasn’t a weakness… far from it. Reality itself wasn’t necessarily stronger or more unbending than the wording of fae magic. That made a true geas extremely strong, but it also meant that some of them could be circumvented or neutralized without being broken.

But the words Embries had said aloud had been a mere description of what he was doing, and they could be as imperfect or flexible as any other description. It was his will that mattered, his will that had held me in place and even now was holding my tongue. It was not a precise instrument, but it didn’t need to be.

His talk about how even someone reading my mind or soul being unable to find the truth might have been just flowery, overblown talk… if it was true, then it was more than just a matter of his will overriding mine.

Was the will of a greater dragon actually faerie magic-level strong? I had to wonder about that. It would mean it was powerful enough to reshape reality, in some ways… but that didn’t seem impossible to me, given everything else that had happened… after he’d accidentally fascinated the majority of the student body, it seemed like not only did the effect fade very quickly but it was downplayed in people’ memories of the event.

There was no reason that couldn’t have just been a purely mental memory tampering of the same sort that a telepath could do, but I didn’t think a telepath could just send out a thought like “I want everyone who saw me doing this to forget about it” and have it be done. It seemed like a telepath would have to go in a mind and do something, examine the memory and rearrange it somehow. The logistics of doing that across the entire campus were mind-boggling.

On the other hand, if he could just will forget… or remember something else… and have it ripple through people somehow…

It was a scary thought, though not the scariest one in my thought by a wide margin… the fact that I was keeping myself occupied by thinking about dragons was a pretty good indication of just how fucked my life had become.

And then I was approaching the topmost flight of stairs and I still didn’t have a clue what I was going to say or what would happen. Amaranth would see the distress on my face… probably even I could have seen the distress on my face. Dee was sure to know that something was wrong from what was leaking out around the edges, even if she couldn’t read my mind and wouldn’t be able to pick up the relevant details if she could.

And what would they think if I couldn’t adequately explain why I couldn’t tell them? I would need time to sort that out, but they would be so anxious and me not telling them would only make it worse. I needed to be able to convince them that I was alright, that things were fine on some level while knowing that in so many other ways I wasn’t alright, things weren’t fine…

I could tell my room was occupied as I approached it. It was too quiet for it to be empty. I realized that under the circumstances the door was almost certainly locked and fumbled for my keys in my coat pocket. The hush inside broke up in a scramble of noises. The door lock was fumbled open, and the door swung inward.

Amaranth was there, looking as beautiful and awful and awfully beautiful as she always did after she cried.

“It’s… over,” I said.

It really was the most I could say.

Soon: Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan, I don’t even know.

The protections flared up as Kent’s hand approached them, then they shifted and flexed and the door opened without incident. I had a sense of something old and strong stirring behind them. It was almost like watching a living thing rouse from its slumber, fail to see anything worth getting up for, and then rolling over and going back to sleep.

It was only as I stepped through the door ahead of Kent that I thought to consider whether we were creeping past a sleeping guardian, or stepping right into the maw of a beast.

There were no agents inside the foyer or the main hallway. It was so quiet inside, and the lights were so dim… the place felt hollow. Cavernous.

I had to remind myself that hollow didn’t mean the same thing as empty. If Embries wasn’t there, someone else would be.

“It’s right this way,” he said, indicating the broad, portrait-lined main hall that led to the chancellor’s office.

I wasn’t at all surprised… it only made sense that the vice-chancellor’s office would be there, too. I hadn’t specifically noticed it during my previous visit, but then, I hadn’t been looking for it. That, and I’d taken a different route in that time.

I was a little bit surprised when he suddenly stopped me and pointed to the left. There was a little cubby set into the wall that at first I thought was just an odd setback since it didn’t seem to lead anywhere, but then I realized it was the top of a narrow spiral staircase.

The idea of descending underground might have worried me, but I was already in the belly of the beast… going down might be the only way out. I didn’t thnk escape was possible, at that point… not with the crazy wards around the building. It seemed to me like those might even give a goddess pause, at least for a moment. Khaele was thought to be confused by or at least somewhat unfamiliar with arcane applications of magic

Again Kent made sure that I went first down the stairs. It was funny, it seemed to me like I had a lot more reason to distrust him… well, it wasn’t funny. Nothing about the situation was.

Though, unaccountably, I felt like I was one good shove in the wrong direction away from bursting out laughing.

The stairs let out in a short downstairs corridor without any branches. It was vaguely trumpet-shaped, widening as it went. There were a couple of hard wooden benches against the wall just before the end, where there was a pair of double doors of some very solid-looking dark-stained wood. They looked very old, antique as opposed to the drab and outdated paneling on the walls and the threadbare institutional carpet… they would have fit in much better with the upstairs corridor. There was a gold-colored plaque above them.

It occurred to me that Kent had gone from talking about how tight-lipped he was to not saying anything, and he’d been that way since we entered the building. He was practically holding his breath by this point. I thought he was going to usher me towards the doors ahead of himself once again, but he looked conflicted for a second and then went forward and rapped his knuckles rather gingerly.

“Enter,” the smooth voice of Vice-Chancellor Edmund Embries said. He managed to make it sound like a polite invitation rather than a brusque command. Kent pushed one of the doors inwards and then swept his arm forward. I stepped up to just on the threshold.

It wasn’t specifically my father’s warning about being in a room with Embries that made me hesitant… it was just a very menacing situation. It could have been Mariel or Twyla in the office and I still wouldn’t want to step inside before I knew the score.

The inside of the office had a bunch of furnishings that were only modern in the sense that they had been made during an age of automated mass production, though not necessarily this one. They clashed badly with the wood paneling and sconce-style lights on the walls, giving the impression of a place that was completely out of joint with time.

There was another door on the side of the office, opposite the desk. It might have been a closet, but the crystal doorknob suggested otherwise, unless Mr. Embries had expensive taste in closets.

I thought there was no sign of Embries, until my second look around when I realized that he was sitting behind the desk, his fingers steppled in front of him. He hadn’t just appeared, or at least, I didn’t think he had… he was just so still that I’d missed him.

He still hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked. His eyes seemed so vibrant, even across the dimly lit room, but I could look right at them and they didn’t flicker in the slightest.

When his mouth finally opened, I almost jumped and screamed in terror.

I didn’t, though… I just jumped.

“And who is this, please?” he said.

“Mackenzie Blaise,” Kent said. “Sir. As you, uh, requested.”

Embries’s head tilted and turned slightly. He stared at me with his cold electric eyes. They reminded me of Celia’s lidless orbs… there were lids there, but they were so resolutely fixed in place that they might have been painted there.

It wasn’t a relief at all when he closed them a moment later, because I still had the sensation of them boring into me. His nostrils gave the slightest flare. I thought I saw his lips part slightly.

“Are you quite certain?” he asked, eyes still closed.

“Quite. Yes. Sir. We’ve had trackers on her since before you requested her,” Kent said, visibly unnerved. His discomfort was even more obvious considering that he’d just blurted that out in front of me. The information wasn’t exactly a surprise, but the fact that he would confirm it in my presence was. “I can verify her identity again…”

“No,” Embries said, his eyes flying open. All at once he seemed a lot more animated. It was like watching a high-end enaction figure with facial articulation coming to life. “I suppose that will be sufficient. Well, this is a slight disappointment… athough it is probably for the best, considering. Arthur, you are dismissed.”

“Yes, sir,” Kent said, backing out of the door. I heard it swinging shut behind me. It was only then that I realized at some point or another I’d started drifting closer to Embries, and was actually still moving slowly closer.

“Miss Mackenzie, you will please stay and you and I will have a little chat,” Embries said as the door clicked closed.

“Ms. Mackenzie,” I said, and I managed to stop my forward progress about four feet away from the desk. “Sir.”

“Oh? Hmm,” he said. “Well, this might be mildly interesting anyway. My most sincere apologies for the rigmarole. The agents of Law naturally tend to believe that any task in which they engage is of the utmost importance, and I have found it’s best to play up that impression. The more of them we can keep busy running around…”

He made a slow circular gesture with his hand.

“You couldn’t just send me an a-mail?” I asked.

“A-mail?”

“Arcane mail,” I said. “Written communication over etheric media.”

“Oh. Like a telegrim?”

“Sure,” I said. It seemed like a bad joke… yeah, I could believe that Embries was old enough to remember telegrims. He wouldn’t even be the only member of the faculty. Not knowing what a-mail was, though? He worked in an office.

“Dealing with such modern complications are among the reasons I like to keep a secretary through the year, when I can,” he said, as though he could pick my thoughts right off of my face. “You don’t have much respect for me, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful or anything, I just… well, I really don’t understand why I’m here.”

“Don’t apologize, it makes things more interesting,” he said. “Unpredictable, that is. At least insofar as I’m less certain how all of this is going to end for you. The rest I have worked out.”

“Then what’s going to happen?”

“Well, I thought we’d have a little chat, as I said,” he said. “I am not so fond of chatting that I have any great desire to repeat myself, so let’s try to keep things moving forward, shall we?”

“I’ve had a lot of chats lately,” I said.

“And have you learned anything from them?”

I thought it was a rhetorical question, just a jab, but as he sat there looking at me I realized he was actually asking.

“What… like a moral, or something?” I asked.

“I despise morals,” he said. “One does not learn a moral; they must be inflicted. I meant a lesson. Have you learned any lessons?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Then it seems I might owe you a refund, in my professional capacity,” he said. “You can use it to pay back your scholarships, who will surely be next in line for one. I met your grandmother.”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out. The segue was so… so not even a segue that I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Your maternal grandmother,” he said. “Martha Blaise.”

“Yeah, uh, I know who you meant,” I said.

“Oh? I see… how very slightly drole,” he said. “I’ve met her twice, in point of fact, though I don’t think she remembered me. I must say, it’s a bit of a blow to my ego to have made so little impression on a person. I doubt she could have recognized me, all things considered, but still… a bit of a blow.”

I didn’t say anything to that. What could I have said? Apologizing again would have made me sound like even more of a smartass, and I gathered he didn’t like having his ego bruised.

“It amuses me that they call themselves white dragons,” he said. “Whites really are the lowest of the low… craftless and venal, scarcely more than beasts. They are utterly incapable of long-term planning, basic manners, or decent conversation. But the humans who set such things down equate the very concept of ‘white’ with purity and virtue, and so the most ignoble of dragons is used as a mascot for some of the more noble of humanity. I would almost like to say that it’s fitting, but I’m afraid I feel humanity is slandered by the comparison.”

“So… does this deal or whatever have anything to do with my grandmother?” I asked.

“Hmm. What? Oh, no… according to Mr. McAvoy’s men, she boarded a regional skiff for Blackwater at Earl P. Osborn Memorial Air Harbor at a quarter past five this evening,” he said. “I suggested they keep an eye on her… more busywork, you know, but I do feel better knowing that she’s gone. The proverbial loose catapult cannot begin to wreak as much havoc as a tightly-lashed one pointed in a direction in which one does not wish for missiles to be hurled.”

“So… why are we talking about her?”

“She’s your relation, and a mutual acquaintance,” Embries said. “I don’t do this very often, I confess, but I’ve gathered that this is how it’s done.”

“How what’s done?”

“Small talk,” he said. “A little conversation before dinner. Don’t make me say the thing about repeating myself ag… oh, drat.” He might have said something stronger, but I was only half paying attention. The bit right before that had made my blood run cold. “Well, to forge ahead: my immediate neighbor to the west has some messy habits that occasionally spill over onto my property,” he said. “For the sake of the peace, I ignore it as much as I can, but when I heard she gave him something to think about I had to go and see her for myself… well, I suppose I see where this is beside the point. Perhaps we should just get right down to it. Miss Mackenzie, are you quite prepared?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, in part because I didn’t know what it was I supposed to be prepared for… and in part because deep down inside, in the small, scrabbling little animal place that only existed in the pit of my stomach and the back of my brain… in the place that responded when Iona or Feejee looked at me with their fathomless black eyes… I was afraid that I did know.

“Well, then,” Embries said, rising to his feet so smoothly that he might as well have levitated, “let’s go in.”

I had no sense of wanting to move toward the crystalline doorknob or of being made to do so… I simply did it. It was warm beneath my hand, and it turned easily and silently. There was another room beyond it, a larger office decorated in the same style as the outer one but with elegant furnishings better suited to their surroundings.

Sitting in one of two high-backed chairs in front of a big black mahogany desk was Iona. She twisted around to look at me as I continued forward into the room.

“Finally,” she said.

“Yes,” Mr. Embries said behind me. His voice seemed to be as close in my ear as Steff’s when she whispered. “Indeed.” The door clicked shut with a sound like a portcullis slamming into a stone floor. “Finally.”

Iona let out a big dramatic sigh that suggested she was even less affected by Embries’s aura of whateverness than I was… and I was accumulating some pretty substantial evidence that I wasn’t actually immune.

“You are a very rude young lady,” he said, gliding around me and heading towards the desk. The slightest touch of his hand on my arm in passing had me heading for the other seat, which I folded myself meekly into. “I’m afraid that I don’t know how to relate to your kind… mammals feel an instinctive and primal fear that can shade over to awe. Goblins and other spawn of the crawling chaos tend to experience enmity or revulsion. Reptiles show a sense of profound reverence and respect… but despite a somewhat superficial resemblance to our nearest relatives in the created orders, I find that piscines simply do not ‘get’ dragons.”

I suddenly became aware of the painting on the wall behind him. Iona’s presence had distracted me, and my mind had not registered it properly… the big gleaming whitish shapes spreading out against the sky could have been the sails of the most stereotypical schooner in the most cliched big old important looking painting imaginable.

They weren’t, though.

They were the wings of what was at the very least a greater silver dragon, to judge by its crown of horns.

“What, now?” Iona said.

“Precisely,” Embries said, and he smiled as he had at the press conference. “Now, I was just telling Miss Mackenzie about her grandmother not recognizing me.”

His smile was not a good smile. It was not a kind smile. It was not a reassuring smile. It wasn’t the sort of smile you gave to someone who was likely to survive seeing it. It was the smile of a gourmand addressing a delicacy. I had never been so glad for someone to not be smiling at me in my life.

Iona seemed completely and utterly unconcerned about being on the receiving end of it.

“Are all old people supposed to know each other?” she asked. “I thought that was just a stereotype.”

“The Shifters, on the other hand… they know how to spot when someone’s wearing a skin he wasn’t born in,” Embries continued. “They saw right through me.” He looked at Iona. “They’d see right through you, too. I confess you’ve had me fooled… that’s a general you, as it happens. I had no idea your kind were still extant. I thought you’d departed this world, or were sleeping beneath it.”

Sea devils, the man had said. When I’d asked if he’d meant mermaids, he’d replied, ““If that’s what you call their kind these days.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Iona said.

“Of course you don’t,” he said. “It’s well before your time.”

“My own kind is before my time?” she said.

“Most people’s kinds are,” he said. “Mine? Markedly less so. But as much as it pains me to say it, I didn’t bring either of you here to talk about me.”

“Then you’d better tell me why you did bring me here or let me go,” she said. “I know how human laws work.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure you’ve seen all about it in the television box,” he said, waving his hand. “Unfortunately for you, I’m afraid we’re quite done with human laws. They have, for the moment, been dispensed with. Or suspended, if you prefer.”

“What?” Iona asked, real concern not so much creeping into her voice as leaping up it to escape as a tiny squeak at the end.

“Oh, my, yes,” Embries said. “You see, it has been decided… with a little counseling from the august personage of myself… that the best way to resolve the matter of the poor dead girl, whatever her name was… is to step outside the laws of the Imperium, which could neither have furnished the bereaved family with an adequate solution nor denied them one without provoking a dangerous domestic situation and/or risking a destructive and expensive war.”

“She was killed by a monster,” Iona said. “I heard it. That’s what the law guys said. She was killed by a monster!”

“Precisely,” Embries said. He had a way of making that one word function as both punctuation and threat. “And so it is in our capacity as monsters that we must deal with it… and deal we shall. As for you…”

His head swiveled abruptly towards me. Up until that point I could almost have believed he’d forgotten I was there, he’d become so focused on Iona… I had almost forgotten that I was there. I’d felt like a detached observer, helplessly watching the horror of Iona’s dawning realization.

“As for you, Miss Mackenzie,” Embries said. “It seems to me that you are not entirely blameless in this. I’m a big believer in letting the punishment fit the crime. Well… no, I’m not actually all that big of a believer in punishment, to be honest. As a general concept, it can go hang itself after denouncing and implicating morals at its trial. But as long as there must be punishments… and they do seem to be rather en vogue right now… why should they not fit their respective crimes? It’s so much neater… so much nicer, in the original sense of that word… when they do. Which, ah, is not to say that the punishments themselves might get a bit… messy.”

His gaze fell back towards Iona then, and I was grateful… so grateful, so pathetically glad to have his eyes off of me when he said it. Let her punishment be messy, I thought… I almost prayed. If I believed there was a god who would hear the prayers of a haf-demon who might be eaten by a dragon then I would have and taken the consequences. Let her punishment be messy, as long as mine isn’t.

“I believe you are both beginning to get the picture where Miss Iona is concerned,” Embries said. “For your part, Miss Mackenzie… well, your crime lies in knowing… knowing and not saying, not doing. What happened was made possible by your inaction. For that? I sentence you to the burden of yet more knowledge.

“You will stay. You will bear witness. You will know what happened here, and you will never… ever… say a word to anybody. If anyone breaches your mind or is privy to your thoughts, they will not be able to see what happens here tonight. You will keep the events so secret that they will be shielded even from someone sharing space in your soul. Do you understand me?

“I’m talking about something quite like a geas… but I am of the wrong persuasion for such bright and brittle faerie magic, and far beyond the cheap imitations your arcanists weave. When I say that these things will happen, Miss Mackenzie, I mean that they will happen, with an emphasis most decidedly on will.”

“I’m getting out of here,” Iona said.

“Oh, no, I’m quite afraid you’re not,” Embries said. He leaned forward over the desk. “And… please, no. Stop trying to shift. You’re much more pleasant this way. All those scales and spiky parts… honestly, it’s like trying to peel an artichoke. Miss Mackenzie, you may stop trying to close your eyes. It won’t do you any good, but it’s irritating to me… if you stop fighting, I’ll allow you to blink normally, and believe me when I say you’ll miss that sorely before too long.”

I hadn’t realized until he said it that I had been trying to squeeze my eyes shut. Despite his invitation, I didn’t stop fighting. The need to move and the inability to do so made the whole thing feel very dream-like. I had a feeling that before it was over, I would welcome that.

“The time has come,” the dragon said. “Miss Iona, you will please lay yourself out on the desk. Miss Mackenzie, be attentive now… we are monstrous folk, and you are about to bear witness to a monstrous thing. I suspect it will probably break you. It might have an altogether more salutatory effect, though, and one way or another, it will certainly change you. It will teach you a lesson, to be sure. There may even be a moral, if only you can find it.”

My eyes seemed fixed to Iona by invisible strings as she got up rather primly and did an obscene, jerky version of a model’s catwalk strut, her scaled legs melting into meaty skin as she did. With a mouth that was locked tightly shut and a face that was horribly placid and calm, she stood at the edge of the desk, turned around to face away from it, and then hopped up backwards. She scooted back as she reclined.

I couldn’t help but notice that Embries’s desk was well long enough to accommodate the entire length of her frame.

“Now if you’re ready, monsters dear,” Embries said, “we can begin to feed.”

Friday: Well… you heard him. What do you think’s going to happen?

Maybe I’d been thinking too small before… maybe it wasn’t Leda’s death that needed a scapegoat, but something that hadn’t even happened yet. It was hard to put a limit on how far Law would go, since chances were good that the worst of their excesses had never come to light.

“I guess it’s a small chariot?” I said to Kent as we stepped out into the sunken patio in front of Harlowe. It was a stupid joke, especially under the circumstances, but I preferred the false joviality he’d first greeted us with to the stony silence I could almost feel him settling into. “Or is it more of a metaphorical vehicle?”

“We’ll be moving on foot from here,” he said, gesturing towards the steps up to ground level. “Towards the eastern edge of campus.”

That told me nothing, since that’s where the carriage parks were. If they wanted to spirit me away in a black wagon or something, they could do it a lot more discreetly by walking me over there first than by pulling one up to the front of the building.

Was that why they’d wanted my cooperation?

It was a little late to do anything about it, though, so I just started walking. I was not at all fooled by appearances… even without an obvious large and well-armed escort squad falling in place beside us, there was no way we were actually alone.There could be snipers on the roofs with crossbows or wands, an assault team following alongside us in extradimensional space, battlemages ready to teleport right on top of us…

Hell, maybe the whole plan was to get me alone outside and try to provoke me into attacking. Then they wouldn’t even need a cover story. The demon girl attacked a man… luckily there were still imperial agents around.

“So… let’s hear it,” I said once we were up on the path and headed around the dorms. “Tell me whatever you actually can tell me.”

“Well, basically… a deal has been brokered to bring the incident to a close,” he said.

“And that’s the incident that was supposedly already brought to a close when they said it was a wandering monster,” I said.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss the nature of the incident beyond the details that have been reported,” he said.

“Oh, come on… you know full well that I know what really happened,” I said.

“I’m not at liberty to say whether I know that or not,” he said. “Or whether I knew it before you just told me. See, kid, we don’t just ironwall people for the hell of it. When you think you’re saying one thing, you’re usually saying three other things you haven’t even thought about.”

“You’re telling me to keep my mouth shut?” I asked. “Isn’t that sort of going to be counterproductive?”

“Only if we want you to talk,” he said. “I told you that I don’t know what the plan is, and I don’t. This isn’t our show.”

“So when you said ‘a deal has been brokered’… you weren’t just abusing passive voice for fun,” I said. “You guys didn’t have anything to do with it.

It was probably unwise to run my mouth like that, but I didn’t feel like I was running my mouth… it was a self-sustaining thing. It was like the sense of danger pressing in from all around me was sharpening my wits, only the “wits” that were engaging in my head weren’t the kind that helped one avoid danger, they were the kind that provoked it into hitting oneself in the face.

It was kind of liberating, but at that moment I would have really preferred some actual liberation to the feeling of it doesn’t matter what I say or do because I am fucked regardless that I was experiencing.

“No, ma’am,” Kent said, with a tightness of jaw that suggested he wasn’t thrilled about that. “We’re just facilitators here. We just want to make sure it all goes down as cleanly and smoothly as possible.”

“I suppose if this really is the end of the whole thing and someone’s figured out how to tie it all off with a nice big bow, then talking is probably the last thing anyone wants me to do,” I said. It sounded fatalistic even to my ears, but I couldn’t see any other conclusion to be drawn. “I’m a loose end, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know that,” he said. “There are ways of ensuring silence. Geases, memory removal and modification… though that one’s probably more trouble than you’re worth. It’s worth.”

I thought about saying something about how I hoped he didn’t think I’d been bluffing about Amaranth calling in Mother Khaele, but I didn’t see how I could say that without making it perfectly clear that I had been bluffing. Just because Amaranth got the personal response more often than not didn’t mean she could make a major goddess do her bidding. I really kind of suspected that Mother Khaele would tell Amaranth to solve her own messes. She might even see this as the unfortunate but inevitable end of her daughter’s involvement with someone like me.

Anyway, there was little point in trying to impress Kent with how much bad stuff would happen if anything happened to me… it wasn’t his decision. He was only the messenger, and he didn’t even have a real message to give me.

“So, what else?” I asked. “That can’t be the whole thing… I mean, there isn’t any reason you couldn’t have said ‘a deal has been brokered’ in front of Amaranth.”

“As I said: every time you say one thing, you’re saying three other things,” he said. “But, no… that’s not it. You aren’t part of the plan. The entity that orchestrated the deal asked for you after it was agreed to by all parties.”

Entity was the first word that jumped out at me… it made me think of the eyeless fish-beast. But while entity was a handy word to describe those who weren’t precisely people, people were entities, too. And so were organizations. In Art Kent’s “not-telling-you-nothing” approach to conversation, all I could really read into that was that he wasn’t saying whether it was a person or what.

So that just left the idea that the entity had asked for me to toll ominously in my brain. As payment? My mind again went to Mercy… I couldn’t imagine her being any kind of a diplomat.

“And you’re going to tell me that you don’t know why I’ve been asked for,” I said. “If I ask.”

“If you ask, I will tell you that,” Kent said. “But only if you ask. There’s never any point to advertising ignorance.”

“For someone who doesn’t want to give anything away, you’re really kind of full of advice.”

“It’s an investment,” he said. “Or maybe a gamble, at this point.”

“What exactly are you investing in?”

“You,” he said. “If you have a future, it could be an interesting one. If you learn to keep your head down, keep a lower profile.”

“Are you trying to recruit me?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “That would be premature, for multiple reasons.”

The unspoken part: not yet.

“Yeah, um… thanks, but no thanks. If I do have a future, I can’t really see a career in the intelligence services in it,” I said.

“I don’t think you’re cut out for Law, per se,” he said. “But there’s a sort of affiliate program I’ve inherited. We always have uses for unique women with interesting talents.”

“I’m hardly unique,” I said. “Except maybe in the sense that everyone is.”

“You’re a half-demon,” he said. “Unlike most other crossbreeds, there aren’t any breeding populations of you anywhere, and no stable mixed populations producing more of you. That means every half-demon is a special case, an anomaly. You’d be unique even if you weren’t you.”

“Why am I in particular unique?”

“All uniqueness is particular, Mackenzie,” he said. “They were just idle words. Don’t read too much into them.”

“Right,” I said. “If I tell you that you remind me of my father, it’s not a compliment.”

“I’ll tell you something for free,” he said. “I’ve met your father.”

“Did you offer him a job, too?”

“I haven’t offered you a job,” he said. Yet. “It’s true, though. I’ve spent my whole career in the central provinces. There aren’t many of what you might call ‘long-term residents’ in this region. We’ve crossed paths a few times.”

“I’ve never met him myself,” I said.

“You already told me I remind you of him.”

“I meant the way he is inside my head.”

“I’ve met him,” he said. “I’ve met me. I knew what you meant as soon as you said it, Mackenzie. It’s a little late to try to cover it with a lie.”

“It wasn’t exactly a lie,” I said. “I’ve never seen him outside of my head.”

“Yeah, that would be the sort of thing he’d do,” Kent said. “He keeps his nose clean, as far as his kind can. There were times we thought he’d gone back below, until another body popped up.”

“Body?” I repeated. I really didn’t want to know, didn’t want to be talking about this, but the hook of the mystery was too barbed and too well-baited.

“Yes, with the heart gone or torn open in the chest,” Kent said. “He needs blood from a virgin’s heart, every thirteen months or so. We don’t have the interval nailed down exactly because we don’t find all the bodies. The diabs say thirteen months is most likely, if it’s not a lunar year.”

“So once a year or so, he kills a virgin,” I said.

“That’s our understanding.”

“That’s… that’s actually good to know,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Can I ask why?” he asked.

“Because I’ll remember it the next time I see him,” I said.

“He’s sneaky about it, though,” Kent said. “He’s sneaky about everything. That’s how he’s managed to stay in plane for so long. Sooner or later, he’ll get cocky and stick his head up, and then we’ll send his ass back to hell.”

“How long is ‘so long’, exactly?” I asked. “How long has he been here?”

“The dossier’s older than the agency,” he said.

“You’re awfully forthcoming about all this.”

“It’s not classified,” he said. “Demon activity is only classified when releasing the information would jeopardize an ongoing operation. This is old news and it’s relevant to you. Honestly, I’m surprised you’ve never looked him up.”

“I wouldn’t know how, if I wanted to.”

“He’s poking around your head. Don’t you want to poke back?”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with him,” I said. “Knowing for a fact that he kills… and how he kills… is one thing, because it gives me another reason to shut him out. Knowing anything else? I don’t know… it just feels like a way of letting him in.”

“If you ever change your mind, reflect me,” he said. “I’ll get you his file.”

“Assuming I’m in any condition to do that.”

“Naturally,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ll take you up on that,” I said. “Take this with as much or as little offense as you want, but I really hope that I never see you guys again after this.”

“Well, then I guess this is just a win-win situation for you, isn’t it?” he said.

“Are you enjoying this?”

“The conversation? It’s fairly pleasant, and quite stimulating,” he said.

“I meant the whole thing,” I said. “The fact that you’re delivering me to what may or may not be certain doom… for the sake of a plan you don’t even know. Do you like what you do?”

“It’s a necessary job. I don’t enjoy every single thing that I do in the course of my performing my duty,” he said. “I shovel shit for a living. No one likes shoveling shit, but I like the fact that it gets shoveled.”

“I’m pretty sure someone somewhere actually would enjoy that,” I said. I thought it was along the lines of something Amaranth might say.

“Probably,” he said. “But those aren’t the people you want to hand a shovel to, generally speaking. Metaphorically or otherwise.”

“Like McAvoy,” I said. “I get the feeling he really enjoys his work.”

“Del doesn’t enjoy anything,” Kent said. “He likes to make sure everyone else is enjoying things even less so he can feel like he’s having a good time.”

I thought I understood one of the other things he was saying there: you’re lucky I’m here, kid. I was lucky it was him and not someone like McAvoy. Art Kent was a grade-A slimeball and probably wouldn’t hesitate to kill me himself if he thought it would preserve order, or aid the Imperium, or maybe even just to advance his career, but he wasn’t Del McAvoy. He didn’t take pleasure in it.

We were nearing the end of the path, and the edge of campus, which was where I imagined the masks would fall off, or at least slip down another inch or so. I didn’t expect to be told what was happening before I was bundled off into a vehicle, but the nature of the bundling would probably tell me something… and assuming that I was able to see and hear and speak, maybe there would be somebody there who would tell me what the hell I was even doing.

But there weren’t any vehicles waiting at the carriage park, that I could see. If there were any concealed by magic, it wasn’t a kind I could pierce.

“I don’t suppose you know where we’re going next,” I said. “At least tell me if you’re coming along, or just handing me off.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “We’re almost there already.”

“Seriously?” I said. “You want me to believe you’re just bringing me out to the edge of campus for the hell of it? What, is there some esoteric law of imperial diplomacy that the edge of a university’s grounds are like international waters? Or are we meeting with an intellectual vampire, who can’t stand on learned ground?”

“No,” he said. He pointed at where the path curved slightly away from the carriage park. “It’s just where the administration building is. That’s where we’re going.”

“Oh, right, you guys took that over, too.”

“There aren’t enough men in the entire central office to take over that building,” he said. “Our agents and the boys from the bureau who set up shop there have mostly withdrawn from it, and those who haven’t have gone home for the night. The offices are closed.”

Translation: it’s a big, empty building that students don’t have access to, set well back away from anything else on campus. That was ominous enough in and of itself.

The part about not being enough men take it over? That wasn’t ominous at all.

Ominous was the spooky music that played while the atmosphere of terror built up to a crescendo. When the crescendo was reached and the monster appeared, things were well past the point of being ominous.

It was like the difference between an omen of death and death.

If the location had been chosen for any other reason besides being conveniently secluded, then I had a strong feeling that the monster was already on the scene.

It was obvious in retrospect what “entity” had brokered the deal, and who had sent an entire contingent or division or whatever of Law agents to fetch me.

Who had been standing there at the press conference, smirking like the proverbial cat that ate the souls of everybody in the viewing audience?

Embries.

Wednesday: …

“You tell them I was coming?” I said.

“I told them you were,” she said, her eyes flicking to Amaranth.

She didn’t say anything more, though… she wasn’t going to be the one to drop the charade that our downstairs guests just wanted a simple chat. I doubted she was privy to anything like what they actually wanted, but she had to know it was more than that.

The downstairs hallway was being occupied by a couple guys in gray suits, one of whom whispered something into the air as we came out of the stairwell. They couldn’t have looked more like guards if they’d been patrolling. Amaranth gave them a big wave as we crossed over to the basement stairs.

I’d somehow been expecting it to be dark in the downstairs lounge, but the lights were on like normal. The TV was even on, showing the local news. There were a few agents watching it. There were about six or seven guys in suits, and they weren’t all dark. There was only one man wearing robes, which were uniformly black to my eyes. That didn’t mean there weren’t others around, of course. I trusted Dee’s sense, even if she was kind of predisposed to notice robes.

They were probably outside, maintaining some sort of perimeter. If they weren’t diabolists, they were wizards of some kind.

The only person I recognized was Del McAvoy, who’d represented Law during our interrogation. That meant I was right about the identity of our guests, and I’d never been less happy to be so. A lot of people didn’t really understand the difference between law enforcement, like the IBF, and intelligence, like Law. They weren’t aware of the role Law had played in international affairs over the past half-century or so, or they believed it to be the stuff of conspiracy theory and over-the-top thrillers. As a student of history, even an amateur one, I knew better.

“Dirty tricks” was too clean a term for the sorts of things Law did. They engaged in assassinations of both the character and the regular type. They’d both instituted and toppled regimes in other nations… they were generally a bit better at the latter than the former, which was ironic given their original charter. Chaos was just that much easier to foment or sustain than order.

There were few limits to what they could do, and no limits on what they would do if they thought they could get away with it. The end always justified the means, and Law had got a lot of mileage out of being able to creatively interpret an end into something that justified the means they wanted to use.

McAvoy had stationed himself behind the front desk. I had been expecting to see him, but while he did look like he wanted to say something, I was sort of surprised that he didn’t approach us.

The other thing that surprised me is that, without realizing it, I’d been expecting to see him looking triumphant or something. I couldn’t read his expression. Nervous? Frustrated? Whatever… he wasn’t happy, and I counted that as a good thing, or at least a neutral one. If I thought he was getting his way in anything, I’d have been really worried.

I was really worried, of course, but that was one specific thing I could be less worried about.

“Ah, you must be Mackenzie Blaise,” a man who surely had my face and name memorized said. He was a tall, broad-built man, with light brown hair that had an impressive amount of spike to it without looking like he’d spiked it up on purpose. He crossed the floor towards us, holding out a hand. “Kent. Art Kent. We’re so glad you could come down to have a little talk to us.”

“Just a talk?” I asked. I took the hand without hesitation. It wasn’t that I trusted him or anything… but if there was a trap for me, I’d sprung it by walking into the room.

“Absolutely,” he said. He glanced at Amaranth. “This must be Amaranth. I’m awfully glad to meet you, but I really think Mackenzie and I should be having this talk in private.”

“Certainly, Mr. Kent,” Amaranth said. “Perhaps your men would like to come with me to the food court, then, so you can be alone?”

He stared at her for several seconds before he burst out laughing.

“Oh, that’s funny,” he said. “But I’m afraid we’ll need them ourselves, to act as an escort.”

“An escort where?” I asked.

“That’s the sort of question I’d be more disposed to answer privately,” he said. “These sorts of things tend to work better, the fewer people we involve.”

“What sorts of things would those be?” I asked.

“Oh, come on… you can’t expect me to answer that,” he said.

“At least tell me what this is about,” I said.

“Oh, you know, really we’re just winding things down in the matter of Leda’s death,” he said.

“You know, I heard on TV that it was a wandering monster,” Amaranth said, with the innocence that only an intrinsically pure being could muster.

“Yeah, well, let’s say it was,” he said. “There is still one or two more steps to be taken before the whole thing can really be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.” He smirked, like he had some great private joke, and then he decided to share it. “Satisfaction guaranteed, you know? That could be like our motto.”

Charitably, I decided it probably sounded better inside his head.

“I’m really not sure I like where this is going,” I said.

“Look, why don’t you and I just duck into the back office for a few minutes?” he said. “I can answer your questions there, try to set your mind at ease…”

“Talking in front of Amaranth would do more to set my mind at ease than anything else you might do,” I said.

“Well, be that as it may, it’s simply the nature of the beast,” he said. “See, I have to ask you to do your imperial duty, Mackenzie, and I can’t ask that of her, legally. She’s not an imperial subject, you see?”

Somehow, I wasn’t reassured that he’d feel the need to do or avoid anything else based on its legality. He wouldn’t leave Amaranth out of his schemes out of respect for the law. In fact, he probably was only invoking it as a convenient excuse… if I’d walked down the stairs with Ian or Steff, he wouldn’t be swearing them to secrecy and then getting down to business in front of them.

“You’re being a lot friendlier than I expected,” I said.

“Oh? What were you expecting? Whips and chains and thumbscrews? Holy water?” he asked. “I don’t see any reason to resort to those sorts of messy extremes when a little friendly talk will work.”

“If it’s such a friendly talk, why won’t you have it in front of my friend?” I asked.

“You two… if you knew how little I’m actually going to be able to tell you when she’s not in the room, this whole thing would seem silly,” he said.

“And that’s supposed to make me want to hear it?” I asked.

“Listen, and I’m only going to say this once,” he said, his smile freezing in place and his manner changing from a mask of phony friendliness to one of understated but very real menace. “Your assistance is not actually required here.”

“You mean we don’t need to help you?” Amaranth asked, in what I kind of hoped was a deliberate misunderstanding, because he wasn’t exactly being subtle with his meaning.

“I mean we don’t need either of you to help us to get what we want out of your girlfriend,” he said. “Your cooperation is the ideal we strive for. It’s not part of the bare minimum that we need to succeed. So if you don’t want to hear what’s going on, if you don’t want to walk out the door with me under your own power, if you don’t want to cooperate with our efforts here today to resolve the matter to the satisfaction of all parties involved, just say the word and we can skip to the end.”

I looked at Amaranth. She didn’t quite shrug, but the impression was there. It was like she didn’t know what to do or say, and that meant I had to make up my mind.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll go in the back room. Amaranth’ll be waiting out here. Afterwards I’m going to talk to her before we go anywhere with you.”

“She isn’t coming along,” he said. “Have no illusions about that.”

“Fine,” I said. Hopefully Dee would be able to trail along. “But I’m going to want a mirror to contact my lawyer before we go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Jenkins already knows where you’re going,” he said.

As far as reassurances went, this one… didn’t. I couldn’t imagine how or why Lee would have become aware of what they had planned, but if he knew and he’d tried to get me away from the school… probably at the risk of serious repercussions to himself… then I could only think that it would mean my life.

“Remember what I said,” Kent said. “Your cooperation is not needed.”

“But you want it,” I said. “Look, if you’re trying to bargain with me…”

“We’re not,” he said. “I just told you…”

“I know what you told me,” I said. “And taking it at face value, this means that you could have had what you wanted as soon as I walked through the door, or sooner, but you’re holding back and asking for my cooperation. This means either you’re bluffing… and don’t bother jumping in there because I know that you’re not, but logically it’s one of the two possibilities… or you really want my cooperation. You’re asking me for something. You’re trying to convince me to give it to you. This is bargaining.”

I had a sudden memory, clear and sharp, of having stood in that room weeks ago and standing up to authority without even meaning to. That had ended with me running out of the room to throw up. I felt like I wanted to throw up, on a mental level, but physically my stomach was almost placid.

How things had changed.

“Okay,” Kent said. “Well, what do you think I should give you for cooperating?”

“Some reassurance that when we’re done I’ll be coming back here safe and sound,” I said.

“Absolutely,” he said immediately.

“Uh huh,” I said.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked. “I give you my word that no harm will come to you.”

“Yeah, when I don’t believe you in the first place, your word’s not worth anything,” I said. “See how that works?”

“Just because you don’t trust someone doesn’t mean they’re never telling the truth,” he said.

“No, it means I’ll never know if you’re telling the truth,” I said. “Which means the first time I could be sure that I’m going to be back here safe and sound would be when I got back here safe and sound, which is exactly the same boat I’m in without your word. You said before you can’t tell me much. If you want my cooperation, tell me straight up: do you even know if I’m going to be able to come back here tonight, alive and whole?”

Several seconds passed.

“I do not,” he said. “But I can tell you, honestly and unequivocally, that no one has shared any plans with me that would involve detaining you or harming you in any way.”

I took that to mean that Mr. Kent’s job consisted entirely of delivering me to someone else who did have plans for me. My mind ticked through several possibilities without prompting.

The most obvious explanation was that I was being arrested, for a value of arrested that didn’t involve a trial of any kind. But they knew I wasn’t behind Leda’s death and I wasn’t going to be publicly scapegoated, so there was a big question of why they’d go through so much trouble.

Perhaps Law had cut a deal with Mercy… she was an assassin, after all, and while I believed her when she said she wouldn’t step outside the bounds of the law, it wasn’t illegal when Law did so. If they engaged her to take care of Iona in exchange for ownership of me… well, I didn’t know if the Department of Law would go that far or not. If they ever had pressed a citizen into slavery to pay off a clandestine operative, it wasn’t like it would make the news. Mercy wouldn’t be able to parade me around or anything, but my life with her wouldn’t be better for that fact, and it wouldn’t impact her long-term plans.

On the other hand, if Mercy had a slave whose provenance she couldn’t ever reveal or explain to the authorities, Law would have her on a leash for the rest of my life. I hoped she was too smart for that. I wasn’t at all sure that she was. She was very old and very experienced, but she seemed to be more than a little cracked around the edges.

Then there was my grandmother. She’d given me until the end of the week to change my mind about coming home with her… it was possible that she’d always had a back-up plan in mind in case I didn’t assent. Did she have the kind of pull needed to get a notoriously clandestine and autonomous imperial agency to abduct me for her? I would have doubted that very much, but I also wouldn’t have believed she was ever in the White Dragons if I hadn’t been handed proof of that. Maybe she was owed favors.

There were no happy outcomes that I could see… there was no reason for the cloak-and-dagger games or the levels of secrecy if someone had found out my part in the anonymous tip and wanted to thank me, for instance. As bad as all of the above were, though, I could see one that was worse, in terms of immediate consequences and long-term prospects.

Unfortunately, it also seemed to be the most likely.

I wasn’t going to be the public scapegoat, but Kent had said that Law was trying to resolve the matter to everyone’s satisfaction. The public might be satisfied, but that didn’t mean the royal family of Mariinsky Lake would be satisfied with blaming their daughter’s death on a random accident involving a wandering monster bypassing the protection of the paths. They would most likely require an actual culprit, somebody who could be punished… brought to something resembling justice.

If Leda had been from any other part of the world, the question of their satisfaction would probably be seen as a diplomatic matter, and it would be handled by diplomats, not spies and assassins. Imperial diplomats would look for the most diplomatic way to convey to royal visitors that they wouldn’t be allowed to torture or kill imperial citizens no matter what.

But because Leda’s family were from the Shift, any hint of tension with them would carry a hint of a flare-up in the still-smoldering ashes of the Chaos Wars. That meant that Law was on the case. Investigators from the Judgment Department would try to resolve things according to the laws of the empire. Diplomats from the Estate Department could be counted to represent the rights of imperial citizens. Law was old school and hard core. It dealt with subjects, not citizens.

There were probably individual agents and factions within the agency that would have welcomed a return to the previous levels of open hostility, but the official policy was that they were supposed to prevent further wars, not try to win them. Would they sacrifice the life of one imperial subject to further that or any other goal? Only if they were sure that a few more lives wouldn’t hurt anything.

But I believed Kent when he said they would do what they wanted with or without my cooperation. I believed they would, and I knew they could. Even the one wizard I knew was in the room would be enough to make sure I was incapacitated before I could so much as scream. They had to be more careful in dealing with Amaranth, but there was a limit to how much resistance a pacifistic nymph could offer.

Well, directly, anyway.

“Okay,” I said to Kent. “Let’s just do it, then. There’s no point in having a big cloistered briefing or anything when you’ve admitted you don’t have anything to tell me. Let’s just go.” I turned to Amaranth, and I almost literally prayed that she would understand why I said what I was about to say, and she wouldn’t say anything to undercut the effect of it. “If I’m not back in two hours… call your mother.”

“Er, it might take a little bit longer than that,” Kent said, visibly uncomfortable.

“Call her anyway,” I said. “Tell her to be ready.”

That was better anyway, I thought. It made it sound like we expected something specific to happen when Mother Khaele heard from Amaranth, rather than simply notifying her that something had happened.

To my considerable relief, Amaranth simply nodded.

“Well, then… I suppose that’s… well… your chariot awaits,” Kent said, gesturing towards the front door.

Soon: In the dragon’s den.

Reminder: The roommate derby will conclude Saturday night at 11:59 central standard time. It’s been a great success and I couldn’t have hoped for more, but if you would still like to participate (as some people have told me they won’t have money before today), please keep the deadline in mind as I’ll find myself in an awkward position if I get a bunch of “votes” arriving after it.

If you haven’t the money to participate but you would like a chance to put a mark on the year two story, I’m going to be making a poll/discussion post about which minor characters people are most interested in. Feel free to throw out stuff like that in the comments at any time… it’s never too soon to start whipping up support for your favorites, and it’s always encouraging for me to hear about what and who people like in my stories. But I’m going to make a centralized place so I don’t have to go searching or trying to divine trends.