I should have asked Julian to look before I went to my appointment . . . but I preferred to risk an official interrogation rather than remind him about what had happened the previous day. Deactivating the shield was no big ceremony at all. One minute I had a giant hole in my spirit; the next, my gifts came flooding back. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, stepping from grey Kansas into a world of color. I wanted to laugh, sing, reach out with my psychic senses just because I could. But I didn’t. I remembered Julian’s stories. When wilder kids left the creche and moved into the main training facility, they were brought to a special room and unshielded for the first time since infancy. Invariably they lost control, whereupon the teachers gutted them again, and that set the pattern for the rest of their training: you only got to keep your gifts so long as you used them responsibly. I wasn’t a kid, and I wasn’t about to lose control — but any sign of frivolous behavior would have sent the wrong message.
