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addiction again, there would be no turning back.
    Dorie plunged her hands into the box.

 
    Chapter 3
    COMPLETE AGAIN
     
    How do you live with half of yourself missing? Is it like the pain of losing a brother, a child? How can you stand to diminish yourself, and then bear up under that self-punishment for seven years? The only possible answer is that it must be an atonement.
    —Thomas Lane Grimsby, Silverblind: The Story of Adora Rochart
    *   *   *
    The blue flooded through Dorie, plummeting her, ricocheting from finger to knee to ear to toe. She felt powerful, alive. She felt as if she had been a covered plant, coiled and white without the sun. She felt as if she had had a seven-year-cold that dampened her taste and smell and touch. She felt as if she had not truly breathed in a long, long time.
    In wonderment she stretched out her hand. The little pranks this morning were nothing now—jostling a teacup, nudging a bolt to fall. She had been able to do those things as a child. Now she crooked a finger and her entire bed on its heavy wooden frame sprang lightly up to the ceiling. Strange, hysterical laughter burst forth, and the bed wobbled in her mental grasp, the bedclothes sliding off and knocking over the apple crate that doubled as her bedside table. The thump of the box falling, her books sliding, registered only from a distance. Her ears and eyes were buzzing with the joy and blue that surged through her, and she made the bed right itself and spin a circle that tangled with the thin curtains, ripping one of them free.
    A banging on the door recalled her. The cross, wheezy voice of their landlady: “What are you two girls doing in there?”
    Hastily Dorie set the bed down—mostly in the right place—and ran to the door. She was shining blue with her self, her self, how she loved her whole self, and she stopped as she reached her shining blue hands for the doorknob, stopped herself and said as meekly as possible, “I’m sorry, Miss Bates, I knocked over a table on my way to bed. It won’t happen again.”
    “See that it doesn’t” was the rejoinder, but slow footsteps indicated the landlady was shuffling away. Dorie could hear the footsteps all the way down the stairs, all the way to the landlady’s rooms, and she wondered how she had managed to track anything in the forest in the last seven years. Why, she had hardly been alive!
    Dorie closed her eyes and breathed, trying to calm herself. There was a reason she had asked the fey how to extract her fey side, how to lock it away. She could not be trusted with the power. If she was going to do this, she had to hope that she had learned some measure of self-control in the last seven years. No, more than hope. She pounded a blue fist into her palm. She had to be damn well sure.
    There was a reason she was letting her fey side free. And that was to disguise herself as a boy, so she could get that field work position. So she could pursue her goals, so she could help the poor and sick in the city. As her stepmother, Jane, was always saying: those in power had an interest in keeping things that way. That’s why Jane was marching with the nurses trying to unionize, though the regular insults of “mannishness” were being hurled at them, as they were with most of the causes Jane joined. Her aunt Helen, too, worked for social justice, but for her own reasons and in her own way. Helen was much more empathetic than Jane or Dorie, apt to pick up a new cause because she had met some poor single mother facing it. And then, her method was to use her social and political connections to make changes at the top. Jane was always there in the trenches, fighting. Dorie despaired, sometimes, at the thought of living up to either one of them. She believed in their work, but she could not imagine putting herself out there so … openly.
    Her brains. Her skills. And in secret. It was all very well for Helen and Jane to boldly put their faces and names on the line. But Dorie