Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  “What exactly are you going to do? You don’t have any authority over me.”

  “Not technically,” he said. “But technicality doesn’t matter. Your actions have narrowed your options down to two, and you aren’t going to like either very much. Either way, you’re done at Valiant.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’ve seen Arcadia. The rules are clear on this; uninitiated visitors are not allowed. My good friend Adam at the Department of Homeland Security would back me up here, I’m afraid, and the DHS does have authority over you.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I sat up straight, arms prickling with goose bumps. “You have my attention. What are the two options?”

  “Option one: You sign a contract with the Arcadia Project. The contract is for life, and among its provisions is that you consent to be tracked by the Project if you leave the perimeter, in the same way that fey are. It also states that you will remain bound by the rules and regulations of the Arcadia Project and the Accord, even if you should later leave our direct employ.”

  “A lifelong contract? Is that even legal?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s arcanely binding whether it’s legal or not. Once you sign, you are committed to everything in its text, so I suggest you read it thoroughly.”

  “Is there wiggle room in any of the—”

  “No.”

  “Okay then. What’s my second option?”

  “Unfortunately, due to the way the Accord is structured, if you insist upon remaining free of the Project’s oversight, we will have to secure all of your proprietary knowledge.”

  “Secure my . . . knowledge. Wipe my memory.”

  Alvin wrinkled his nose briefly. “There’s no wiping involved. We have someone lock down the mental pathways leading to those memories. It would be complicated, and there’s a definite risk that it would increase your mental instability. You would also be useless to Inaya West, and therefore you’d lose your job either way.”

  “And my apartment. At least the first option leaves me a job, and housing. I don’t see how I really have two options at all.”

  “You can choose to forget about us and walk away,” said Alvin, something sad touching his face for a moment. “People have. And I can understand why, even though it leaves you very alone in the world. For some people, freedom is more important than security.”

  “People who have no idea what a real lack of security feels like,” I said bitterly.

  “That’s my take on it,” he said. “It’s not very American of me, but I’d rather live under a thousand stupid rules and know I’m safe than be ‘free’ to blunder into an oncoming train.”

  “I’m not sure which is worse,” I said. “But in this case, I don’t get to be free either way. Living with six months of my life missing isn’t exactly freedom.”

  “I wish I could give you more choices than that,” said Alvin. “I also wish you hadn’t painted yourself into this corner. Caryl should have known better. You don’t know the Accord, but she does. She knew what she was doing, taking you there.”

  I looked down at my hands. “She knew what I’d choose. She wanted me back.”

  Alvin was silent for long enough that I eventually looked up at him.

  “Do you see why I was concerned,” he said, “when you told me she had a ‘crush’ on you? She’s a teenager, Millie, a wickedly smart one who’s used to wielding life-and-death power. She’s manipulative, and calculating—”

  “And she’s my friend,” I said. “I’ll yell at her about it later, but right now my priority is getting her off death row, and dealing with what I found when I was in Arcadia.”

  “Which is?”

  I stared him down, clamping my lips shut.

  “Fine,” he said. “Once you sign the contract, you’ll have to tell me anyway. I’ll go prepare it. You’re not squeamish about needles, are you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Uh, why?”

  “Because this,” he said, “is not the sort of contract you sign with a ballpoint pen.”

  25

  I was up until two a.m. just reading the damned contract; it was forty-six pages long and written in near-microscopic type, in language that made standard legalese read like a comic book. All the convoluted, dry verbiage in the world couldn’t disguise what I was actually doing, though, which was signing my life away.

  Let’s be real about it, though; I’d done that back in June, the minute I’d agreed to meet some weird stranger named Caryl Vallo in a park in Santa Monica. But this was the first time I’d fully faced that realization, seen in literal black and white.

  There was one ray of hope, a distant one. Apparently, if I earned my way to senior agent status and then found a full-time job outside the Project where I could be useful—like Spielberg, or this Adam guy at the DHS—I’d no longer have to serve as an agent. They’d still track me and I’d still be bound to secrecy on pain of brain-wiping and all that, but I’d no longer have to live in a Residence or deal with arcane craziness on a day-to-day basis; I could live a basically normal life unless the Project needed a favor. But it would have to be a much more influential job than I had any prayer of getting. And so long as I was still an agent, any outside employment had to be short-term or part-time. Sorry, Inaya.

  When I was finished reading, I went to the dining room as instructed, with the papers in hand. Stevie was waiting there, sullen and silent as usual; everyone else had gone to bed, I guess. She presented me with an ostentatious quill pen. The pen appeared to be filled with the blood Alvin had extracted from me when I started reading, hours earlier. I thought about asking what he’d done with the rest of the blood, but even if Stevie had answered me, something told me I wouldn’t have wanted to know.

  I signed my name, disturbed by the way the “ink” sat wetly on the page, refusing to sink into the fibers. I left the paper at the table to dry and made my way to room 6, my old room at the base of the tower. My one non-negotiable request had been that they put my air mattress in there and not ask me to sleep in Teo’s or Gloria’s old room.

  Alvin had enough heart to grant me that request, but he did not have enough heart to let me sleep past eight a.m. the next morning. My phone rang at about three minutes to, and I was so groggy it took me a few minutes to understand what he was asking and that by “peninsula” he meant the hotel, with a capital P.

  “Today?” I said stupidly. “High tea in Beverly Hills today? My clothes are all in Manhattan Beach, and I’m not sure I even have anything there that doesn’t have holes or coffee stains.”

  “I’ve given you as much warning as I could,” said Alvin. “I didn’t think you’d want me waking you any earlier.”

  “You guessed correctly,” I grunted. “Unfortunately the only person who can drive me anywhere is possessed. Do I need to explain that?”

  “The king briefed me.”

  “But he hasn’t come to help Tjuan yet.”

  “He will. I’m assigning Tjuan as your partner.”

  “He said you might. But he’s not taking me anywhere this morning, I don’t think. Is Caryl allowed out of the basement, or do I have to call a cab?”

  “Cab,” said Alvin. “Caryl is still our only murder suspect.”

  “Guilty until proven innocent?”

  “It’s not as though Tamika was stabbed,” said Alvin. “And yes, there was a wraith there, but we already know it didn’t kill her.”

  “We can argue about this later,” I said. “I’ve got to find clothes.”

  “First,” said Alvin, “now that you’ve signed the contract, it’s time for us to discuss what you learned while you were in Arcadia.”

  “Will you even believe me? You don’t have a great history when it comes to that.”

  “Do me a favor and drop the attitude. I’m either your boss, or your boss’s boss, depending on how events fall out. And the sooner you get used to taking orders without making personal drama out of it, the easier your life is going to be.”

  �
�Is it too late to put that signature back in my veins?”

  “I know you think I’m the bad guy,” said Alvin, reminding me unpleasantly of Vivian, “but I’m just trying to prepare you. If you think I’m a hard-ass, I’m not sure you’re going to survive ten minutes with Belinda. She wasn’t knighted during World War Two for patching up soldiers, you know. She was a goddamned sniper.”

  “Fine, boss. No need to get so dire about it. What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. But do me a favor and let me decide what parts of your story to tell Belinda. I don’t want you in her sights unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  • • •

  Dame Belinda Barker was not shorter than Caryl, as it turned out, nor did she smell like prunes. Her white hair was flawlessly curled; her dress was impeccably tailored and a vaguely military shade of blue.

  “There you are,” she said as Alvin and I approached across the Peninsula’s Living Room; my boots were indecently loud on the oak parquet.

  Belinda’s age was not evident in any hand tremors or grandmotherly absentmindedness that might have stirred my sympathy, but in the almost alarming transparency of her skin, which held on to her bones for dear life. Half-hidden by tired, pinkish folds were two of the sharpest, most relentless gray eyes I’d had the misfortune of meeting. According to Alvin’s heads-up in the rental car, she was all but blind on the left side, but I couldn’t have guessed it by the way she held my gaze.

  At Alvin’s gesture, I seated myself on the honey-colored sofa across from her and arranged my skirt awkwardly as Alvin took a seat next to me. I’d managed to find a flowered dress from my UCLA days when I’d been twenty pounds heavier, and I’d stuffed my prosthetic feet into a pair of brown leather boots. Combined with the now greenish bruise on my cheekbone from Monday’s encounter with the possessed IT lady, the effect was as gruesome as one might imagine.

  Next to us was a cream-colored marble fireplace; on the mantel a white orchid gazed demurely at its own reflection. On the low table between us was spread the glory of the Living Room’s traditional high tea. But it was Saturday, not Sunday, and no one else was gathered nearby enjoying the same. I had the distinct impression that Belinda had simply stared down the hotel staff until they’d brought her scones and clotted cream with due ceremony.

  “Millicent Roper,” she said. She did not offer me her hand, as hers were occupied with cup and saucer. “I am pleased to hear from Alvin that you chose to come work for us.”

  I wanted to say something steely like It wasn’t as though I had a choice, but instead I said, “You are?”

  “Of course,” she said. Her accent wouldn’t have been out of place at Buckingham Palace. “It’s rare to find someone who possesses both useful talents and the proper circumstances to make an appropriate employee of the Project.”

  Again, something stopped me from making a bitter commentary about “proper circumstances.”

  This kind of instant deference to a fellow human being wasn’t like me. But here was a woman who had lived through bombings, been knighted by King George, for God’s sake. She was the closest thing my species had to what the manticore was in Arcadia—a relic of another era.

  “Given our time frame,” Dame Belinda said once I’d politely refused a cucumber sandwich and stumbled my way through pleasantries, “we are left with very few options, and only one that has any hope of saving the Arcadia Project.”

  I sat up straighter, then glanced around the room again. We were the only three in the entire lounge, and I began to suspect that this, too, was a situation that Dame Belinda had stared someone into submission to arrange.

  I’d expected to have to explain my plan; it had never occurred to me that while I was trespassing in Arcadia and making deals with demons, the bureaucracy might also be doing something. I didn’t have much hope that their plan would address the scope of the problem, but I was willing to grasp at any possibility that meant I didn’t have to offer up my alternative.

  I hadn’t told Alvin about my plan to bring the manticore through the Gate. It was a lie of omission, but one I thought necessary given his emphatic disapproval when I’d confessed to interviewing the thing. So all I’d told him, aside from the all-important time frame, was that Vivian had made the manticore a mysterious promise, and that Throebrand was deeply pissed off that she couldn’t deliver.

  “I am led to understand,” said Dame Belinda, “that these . . . wraiths King Winterglass discovered have the ability to possess sentient beings, and to repossess their hosts on Earth if set free in Arcadia.”

  “Unfortunately yes,” I said. “It happened to Tjuan.”

  “But the wraiths are helpless on this side. Stranded, unable to move or possess anyone beyond a certain range.”

  “Yes, when they’ve possessed someone, they’ve always been sort of . . . adjacent. At least in my experience, and I’ve been present at more possessions than anyone else in the Project.”

  “That does allow us one course of action that could be implemented within the week, but it is a less than satisfactory one.”

  “Which is?”

  “To bring the Bone Harp to the soundstage at Valiant Studios, and have the Seelie Queen’s harpist play it there.”

  “I—what?” I’d been expecting some kind of myopic garbage: an elderly reactionary’s denial of the situation’s urgency. This was—not that.

  “Was I unclear?”

  I looked at Alvin; he just gave me a barely perceptible shrug. I looked back at Belinda. She cranked one white brow upward in a way that impelled me to speak.

  “I understand what you said, but—maybe I’m not clear on what the harp does. I thought it drew all arcane energy to its location.”

  “That is correct.”

  “I also understood that arcane energy on this side gets trapped where it came through.”

  “Yes.”

  “So—if the harp is over here . . .” I looked at her, waiting for her to explain where my logic had gone wrong.

  She just stared me down with her pale, sharp eyes.

  “You’ll be taking all of Arcadia’s magic,” I finished. “And storing it on a soundstage in Manhattan Beach.”

  “I did say it was a less than satisfactory solution.”

  “I—can’t really disagree. This is—kind of the nuclear option, isn’t it?”

  “If you have other ideas, now would be the time to mention them.”

  I drew in a long breath, considering whether or not to speak. Dame Belinda waited patiently, but in the end I couldn’t do it. There was no way I could make my idea sound palatable, and if she flatly forbade it, that would take it off the table.

  “Your idea would stop the attacks,” I ceded, “but then what? What happens in Arcadia if there’s no arcane energy?”

  “Existing spells would be unaffected, as only energy unbound by spellwork can respond to the song. But no further spells could be cast until the energy is released. In an emergency case, a less important spell could be unraveled and its energy repurposed, but all working of spells would have to be carefully rationed and controlled.”

  “I have a hard time imagining Arcadia agreeing to this idea.”

  “Arcadia already has,” said Dame Belinda. “Both the king and queen have given their approval to the measure, with the understanding that the Arcadia Project’s top priority thereafter will be finding a way to separate these ‘wraiths’ and safely contain them, so that the harp may be returned and used as before.”

  “How long do you suppose that’ll take? Keeping people out of stage 13 has already been a challenge for Inaya, and she loses my help on Monday. Are we talking days here? Months?”

  “I cannot begin to imagine,” Belinda said. “Until two days ago I did not know there was such a thing as a wraith. We are at a new frontier. If the circumstances were not so appalling, it would be exciting.” She could not possibly have sounded less excited.

  “What do you need me to do?” I said. “I assume there’s
a reason it’s me at this meeting and not Phil or someone.”

  “You are here because I wished to hear your opinion.”

  “My—opinion?” She was speaking English words, but I couldn’t process their meaning.

  “Of everyone in the Arcadia Project, you have the broadest experience with the current problem. You were the last to see Vivian Chandler alive. You were the first to see a wraith, and as you just stated, you have witnessed more possessions than any other individual. You may be our newest employee, but I would have to be blind in both eyes not to see your value.”

  Of all the people to give me validation out of left field—Dame Belinda Barker, head of the Arcadia Project? Yet another crucial thing I wouldn’t get to bring up in therapy Tuesday night. Dr. Davis thought the Arcadia Project was some sort of cult that had brainwashed Caryl; she’d been thrilled when I’d left them back in June.

  I looked at Alvin; there was something a little strange in his smile.

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said. “But as far as what I have to say, it’s nothing you don’t already know. This is an awful idea, and would be catastrophic to Arcadia, at least temporarily. But I have nothing better to offer, and it’s reversible if we come up with something better, right? Just a matter of taking the harp back to Arcadia.”

  “In theory,” said Belinda. “In truth, the transport of the harp disturbs Arcadia’s leadership more than the temporary rationing of magic.”

  “Why? Is it that fragile?”

  “No more so than any other ancient relic, but imagine if the Mona Lisa or the Rosetta Stone were being shipped temporarily to a war-torn third-world nation, and you’ll have an inkling of their concern.”

  “So this thing matters that much to them?”

  “Yes. It belonged to the last Unseelie Queen.”

  I let that sink in for a moment. “Why aren’t there Unseelie Queens? Or Seelie Kings, for that matter?”

  “It’s rather a complicated story.”

  “I have time,” I said, hoping I had the patience to match.

  Dame Belinda set down her empty cup and folded her hands in her lap, looking thoughtful. “The Unseelie we deal with today are . . . troublesome, but they were once truly evil, ruled by monsters. In those days the sidhe were one of many races, Seelie aligned, and relatively weak. The fey call this the Time of Beasts. In that time, the law of succession was based solely upon each monarch’s ability to murder his or her predecessor.”