Chains and Memory by Marie Brennan Page A

whatever was going on, there would be a big market for it. The sky and root cards were no better. I had pentacles again in both places, telling me that money would be one of the driving forces. But the greed the sky card pointed at wasn’t just for money, it was for something more. Whatever experience the drug was going to grant, I suspected. Down in the root, the five of pentacles depicted beggars shut out of a church: people abandoned, or at least people who felt that way.
    Those three fit together. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the nine of swords, though. It was an unpleasant card, full of conflict and impossible decisions, and its position indicated the past. Without context, though, I was having a hard time getting a bead on what conflict it might be pointing at. It could be anything from the return of the Otherworld down to recent economic policies that had pushed people into a bad corner. All the pentacles made me think something like the latter might be it, but I wasn’t sure.
    I laid the remaining eight cards in a circle around the first five, hoping they might clear it up. Fewer pentacles here: I got a couple of wands, a couple of cups, Temperance reversed, and on the last card —
    The last card was the outcome, the piece that tied it all together. I hadn’t even begun to think about what the previous seven cards told me, much less how they fit in with the first five; drawing conclusions based on one card was not best practice for tarot reading.
    But the instant I saw it, I knew.
    The High Priestess, reversed. She could indicate a lot of different things; many of the Major Arcana were complex that way. When I laid the card down, though, my thoughts made an intuitive leap, from the seated woman of the image to psychic powers to the purpose of this entire reading.
    The drug I was casting for . . . it was the powder the Unseelie had used to turn me into a wilder.
    The stuff wasn’t a drug, not the way we generally used that term. Last I’d heard, nobody really knew what it was—nobody human, anyway, and the sidhe weren’t telling. Somebody had dubbed it “fairy dust,” and the name stuck. The CDC guys who examined me thought it was some kind of retrovirus in powdered form; that was their best guess for how it had triggered the mutation in my DNA. But I’d also been questioned by people from the DEA, because the way the sidhe used it was more like a drug.
    And that was exactly the way humans would treat it, once they got their hands on the stuff.
    I quickly swept the cards together and began a second layout, this time with my thoughts focused on the powder. Even if the client wasn’t asking about fairy dust, I needed to know. Other people would need to know, so they could take action before things got bad.
    Sometimes the cards were cryptic, but not this time. If that powder became available to the general populace, it would find buyers. Bloods wanting to jack their gifts up to higher levels — that was how the sidhe used it on themselves, though for them the effect was temporary. “You bloody fools ,” I whispered, fingers tightening on the remainder of the deck. I survived the transition, but that was no guarantee anybody else would be as lucky. The same transition had killed my brother Noah, years ago.
    It wasn’t worth the risk. But that wouldn’t stop people from trying.
    They wouldn’t be the only market, though. There were a thousand snake-oil salesmen out there, promising baselines that a secret regimen of herbs or meditation or whatever would unlock their hidden potential, triggering the awakening that nature hadn’t bestowed. If this powder could deliver on those promises, the sidhe could have a good percentage of the world’s non-psychic population eating out of their hands.
    My hands were shaking badly enough that I had to lay the deck down. Had Adam known what this query was about when he handed me the file? Or