Borderline

by Mishell Baker

BEWARE OF DOG, read the sign on the gate.

  “What kind of dog lives here?” I said nervously when Caryl had turned off the car.

  “No dog,” said Caryl as we got out. “But I thought ‘Beware of Interdimensional Portal’ might be a bit confusing to the average home invasion specialist. The sign serves the same purpose: it encourages any interested parties to rob the house next door.”

  “Why doesn’t Residence Four have a sign? Isn’t there a Gate there too?”

  “Residence Four was the first property we built specifically to protect its Gate. The Gate here had to be built inside a preexisting house, so it is placed . . . more awkwardly.”

  “Why is this called Residence One? Was it the first?”

  “The sixth, technically. The original LA1 Gate was demolished along with the Hotel Arcadia in 1909, and we were unable to replace it until we could acquire a suitable property two years later. This was the best we could manage.”

  “Do you live here?”

  She shook her head, unlocking the wooden gate. “Manage­ment lives in independent housing; agents live in Residences and deal with the fey that have been assigned to their Gate. Rivenholt uses LA4, and that is why you and Teo were assigned to him.” Caryl waved us all through into the yard. “Residence One is more of an office than a residence, in truth; it houses the majority of our arcane equipment. Travel through the Gate is limited to our oldest and highest-ranking visitors—the reactionary sort who take offense at being assigned a lower number.”

  The tiny front yard of Residence One boasted a lemon tree and several carefully staked tomato plants. A disheveled old woman with stark wide eyes stopped her weeding to stare at us as we walked by and up the front steps.

  “Sick sick stinking ugly fuckpiss!” the woman gargled.

  “Hello, Abigail,” replied Caryl. No one but me seemed to find this odd, and I was not in the mood for any more public demonstrations of my ignorance.

  The inside of the house looked like the inside of every other house in Southern California; there wasn’t even anything worth stealing. Overwhelmed by ennui, I turned to leave, running headlong into a snickering Teo.

  “That just never gets old,” he said, taking me by the shoulders and turning me back around to face the interior. “Don’t know why you bother with the dog sign, Caryl.”

  “The fey did not put up that ward for sport, Teo. It is a last resort.”

  Teo gave me a push out of the tiny foyer into the living room, and as he did so, the ward released its hold on my ­psyche. The shimmering black archway in the center of the living room suddenly struck me as decidedly not normal, and I made a small sound to that effect.

  Gloria was at least polite enough to put her hand over her mouth to hide her smile. Tjuan, as always, was tombstone-­serious.

  The archway looked like a massive ring half-buried in the floor, its inner radius around seven feet. Its foot-wide rim was a metallic gray so dark as to be almost black, and it threw off light like glass. Inside the arch was the part that fried my brain: the space described by the semicircle simply wasn’t there. When I tried to look at it, my visual cortex got some kind of horrible feedback, a cross between a low-grade electric shock and a free fall. My mind filled in the space with a variety of interesting stuff: analog TV fuzz, a gaping black hole, swirls of color like sun on oil on water.

  “Stop looking at it,” said Caryl, and I felt the silk of her glove over my eyes. “You will never make sense of it, and you can have a stroke or a seizure if you keep trying.”

  I turned to her, aghast, as she took her hand away. “Why would you even put that there!”

  “As I’ve mentioned, ours is not the only world under consideration. Gates must be built in the exact same spot in both worlds, which is extraordinarily difficult to balance.”

  “Arcadia is on the other side of that?”

  “Not if you walk around it,” said Caryl. “But come; that is not what we are here to see.”

  27

  Caryl led us down a short hallway to what would have been the master bedroom, if this had been a normal house. There was one other bedroom, but the door was shut and there was Latin pop music playing inside.

  “Someone lives twenty feet from that thing?” I said. “How?”

  “Two people. Luis is blind, and Abigail lives in a separate apartment beneath. Most of our agents live in Residences Four and Five; by the time we built them, we had learned from our earlier mistakes.”

  All at once I started shivering and couldn’t stop.

  “Someone hold her hand,” said Caryl.

  The men both just stared at me, but Gloria slipped her hand into mine, and my body stopped shaking before my brain could remind me that I hated her guts.

  “You get used to it,” Gloria said. Her voice grated on my nerves, but the feel of her palm against mine was a comfort that was hardwired into my humanity, all the more powerful because I so rarely felt anything like it anymore.

  Gloria let go of my hand when we reached the back bedroom and wiped her palm on her thigh. So much for warm fuzzies.

  The room was furnished like an office, with a computer station and cherrywood desk and credenza, filing cabinets and corkboards, office chairs and a couple of armchairs for reading. The only object that seemed unusual was a small device lying flat on the credenza: a tablet computer, perhaps, but designed in the improbable size and shape of a bread plate.

  Only as we got closer did I realize it was not an electronic device at all. Its frame was made of a pale silvery wood, and as we approached it, the “screen” trembled ever so slightly, a liquid response that obscured the display. We gathered around close enough to see it, and then Caryl held up an ivory-gloved hand. Hold still, the gesture said, and we obeyed.

  As the “screen” settled and became glassy once again, it revealed an image: an open flower with blue-white petals against a burgundy backdrop. The colors were too lush, too raw and textured to have been created by any means I understood. They looked, for lack of a better word, real.

  “Show the census,” Caryl said. The petals folded in on themselves, and then a series of golden dots began to appear slowly on the screen, one at a time in random locations, like the beginning of rainfall. I thought I spotted a couple of darker dots as well, but the overwhelming majority were golden, varying slightly in size. They appeared more rapidly for a moment, then began to slow and finally stopped.

  Two numbers appeared: 88 and 5. The first figure was silver-­gold, the second a dark purplish green. Seelie and Unseelie.

  But even as we watched, the Seelie number flickered. Another number fitfully tried to replace the 88, but it came and went subliminally fast, making it impossible for me to read.

  “In the past,” said Caryl quietly, “the display has only done this at the moment when a fey was in transit via one of the Gates. It would show, for example, both eighty-eight and eighty-seven during a fey’s exit, but would settle at eighty-seven afterward.”

  I glanced at Caryl’s face, forgetting for a moment that I would read nothing there to tell me the relative seriousness of the matter.

  Gloria craned her neck to see. “And it’s been doing this for days and days?”

  “Not precisely this,” Caryl said. “The numbers have changed as fey have come and gone, but the difference between them has been constant, and the base number has always exactly matched the number of expected Seelie in the area. Until now.”

  “What should it read?” I said.

  “Eighty-nine. One Seelie fey who should be in Los Angeles is not being counted.”

  I stared at the eighty-eight, chewing my bottom lip.

  Teo was the one to say what I was afraid to speak out loud. “Does that mean Rivenholt is dead?”

  Caryl shook her head slowly. “Normally that would be my first assumption. When the number drops without record of an exit through th
e Gate or perimeter, it signifies a death.”

  “You say that as though fey have been killed here before,” I said. “Wouldn’t that have broken the whatsit? The treaty thing?”

  “The Accord? No. There are ways a fey can die bloodlessly. There are consequences, of course, if a human does the killing, but it’s the shedding of blood in particular that is the Accord breaker.”

  “That seems like a fairly stupid technicality.”

  “It is not. Spilled fey essence is of more concern to Arcadia than any particular citizen. The short explanation is that when norium touches the earth—”

  “—or a train platform,” Teo cut in.

  “—or a train platform, it exerts an arcane pull on the corresponding spot in Arcadia. Norium is what designates a thing ‘of Arcadia’ rather than ‘of Earth.’ So when our ground is tainted with norium, it acquires . . . strange properties, and we have to seal that area off from the public. Worse yet, the corresponding location in Arcadia essentially . . . falls through into the space between worlds. Leaves a hole.”

  “Holy shit.” I ran a hand through my hair. “So I’m assuming the Arcadians already know about the bloodshed this afternoon.”

  “It will take a while for the rupture to occur, but no more than a few days. I would prefer that we had some sort of explanation, at the very least, by the time that happens. The iron in the tracks may help mitigate the effects, especially on our side, but there is no telling what the extent of the destruction in Arcadia will be.”

  I stared at the screen again as though it would help. It didn’t. “You said you don’t think Rivenholt is dead? Why?”

  “Look.” Caryl pointed to the Seelie number as it flickered. I squinted at it but still couldn’t make out the other number.

  “Ninety-four,” said Tjuan.

  “Does that number have some significance?” I asked.

  Caryl nodded. “When the anomaly began, the difference was always five. For example, if the base number was eighty, it would flash eighty-five. If the base number dropped to seventy-­nine, it would flash eighty-four. This is the first time the two numbers have had a difference of six.”

  “Which means—?”

  “That somehow there were five ‘half-present’ fey before, and now there are six. Given that the change took place sometime after I checked the census this morning, logic suggests that the new half-present fey is Rivenholt.”

  “What does half-present mean? Maybe fading, becoming human?”

  Caryl shook her head. “A life-form that organically contains even a trace of norium is counted by the census, which is why the Unseelie number reads five instead of four. It is counting me.”

  “The, uh, norium—it’s in their blood, right? So, what if Rivenholt’s last bit spilled out onto those railroad tracks?”

  “Then he would not be counted at all, the same as if he had died.”

  “So, what then? There are six fairies just standing in a Gate somewhere?”

  Caryl shook her head. “You cannot stand in a Gate; the body’s reaction to being between worlds is a violent repulsion to one side or the other. Also, there are only three Gates in this perimeter, and I have inspected all of them daily.”

  “I give up then. What exactly is going on?”

  “I have been preoccupied with that question for over two weeks now.”

  Gloria spoke up softly. “This is why y’all need more experienced help,” she said.

  Teo snorted. “I’ve been with the project longer than you have, and so has Caryl.”

  “That hardly counts, sweetheart. Y’all two spent the first few years playin’ dolls and buildin’ pillow forts.”

  I blinked and looked at Caryl. “How old are you?”

  “Hon, you’re not supposed to—”

  “Nineteen,” Caryl said.

  Yet another moment of everyone watching me react to something they already knew. I looked at Caryl’s impassive face. She had no visible lines around her eyes or mouth, but in L.A. you can’t read by that sort of thing. She dressed old. Sounded old.

  “Nineteen?” I said skeptically. “You sound like a forty-year-old smoker.”

  “Vocal cord damage.”

  “From what?”

  “From screaming,” she said. “A great deal of screaming.”

  You’d think after a week with these people I would have learned to stop asking questions.

  • • •

  I ate dinner at the table with everyone at the Residence that night, but I decided to take a lesson from Stevie and sit around brooding while the others talked.

  Teo’s exquisite nectarine jerk chicken salad might as well have been McNuggets for all I could taste it. But I sat through dinner because Caryl was there, and I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. Judging by the constant tingling sensation on my neck and shoulders, Elliott had been all over me like a prom date since we left Residence One, and I knew that meant Caryl wanted something from me, even if she herself was eating one-handed while reading through Rivenholt’s file for the eighty-fifth time with the other. I just had to wait until her Reason Mind came up with a justification to ask for what her Emotion Mind wanted.

  I could see it now, past the dark liner around her eyes, the expertly applied shading under her cheekbones. How could I have missed the veinless smoothness of her skin? She didn’t exactly exude good health, but there were no signs of age, either, aside from her voice and manner.

  When she had finished eating and began pulling her gloves back on, she finally spoke up. “Millie, I need to see you in your room.”

  Gloria eyed us both as we left; I could feel her stare boring into my back. My mind half formed a cliché about fitting me for a knife; then I remembered I wouldn’t be her first victim. I followed Caryl up the stairs and let her into the dark warmth of my room, where I turned on the overhead light and shut the door behind us.

  28

  “You’ve only one chair,” Caryl said, looking around my room.

  “You’re young,” I said. “Sit on the floor.”

  She did, folding her legs carefully and resting her gloved hands on her knees. “There’s something you probably ought to know,” she said.

  “Just one thing?” I pulled my folding chair closer to her and sat in it, then slipped on my fey glasses. Elliott was settling himself comfortably on my knee. “Does this have anything to do with your mother, or your gloves, or why you’ve done forty years’ worth of screaming?”

  Elliott blinked at me, his wings drooping.

  “No,” Caryl said.

  “Well, those are the things I want to know about, before you start in on any more terrifying revelations about parallel universes.”

  “Is my history important?” said Caryl. Elliott was making himself very small on my lap.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “because I don’t know your history. Take off your gloves.”

  “I don’t think that is a good idea,” she said dryly.

  “It’s just us,” I said.

  Caryl shrugged and began to pull off her gloves one finger at a time. “It doesn’t really matter what I feel, much less why. There is no rhyme or reason; it’s nothing more than a chemical bath in the brain. Could we discuss instead what I came up here to talk about?”

  “Come over here. Give me your hand.”

  Elliott rustled his wings in apparent frustration. “I cannot do that,” said Caryl blandly. “That is the entire point of the gloves.”

  “I’m starting to get that. Why are you so weird about touching?”

  “Skin-to-skin contact creates so much conflicting neurochemical input that it overloads the Elliott construct. Shatters it. If I am not the one to deconstruct the spell, I cannot ­reabsorb the lost energy, and I must take a trip to Arcadia to replenish myself.”

  I sighed, looking at her Buddha-like postu
re and then at Elliott, who was attempting to hide his eyes in my shirt. “I don’t know what to do with you,” I said.

  “You could start by letting me return to relevant matters.”

  “Damn it, Caryl,” I said. “I guess you don’t have to tell me what made you this way. But it’s going to keep bothering me, and I’m going to keep asking.”

  Elliott wrapped both wings around his head, looking miserable. Caryl studied me a moment before speaking again.

  “They took me when I was a baby,” she said, starting to put her gloves back on. “The Unseelie Court. I don’t remember my life before that—I was too young—and I will not talk about what it was like there.”

  “Okay,” I said, drumming my fingers on my knee. “How did you get back here?”

  “Eventually the Unseelie King discovered me and reported me to the Project. The Project returned me to my parents. I was seven years old.”

  “Did they even recognize you?”

  “No, nor I them. To be frank, I was hardly human. They’d had two more children, built another life. I was institutionalized. After two years my predecessor, Martin, took an interest in me, taught me how to make Elliott. Once my behavior improved, I was released. My parents gave me into Martin’s custody, and I began to work for the Arcadia Project as his assistant until he passed away four years ago.”

  “Was horribly murdered by Vivian, you mean.”

  “Yes.” Caryl gave the wrist of each of her gloves a tug to settle them on more snugly. “I was the only wizard or warlock not already entrenched in a more important position, and so National allowed me to take over for him.”

  By my math, that made her fifteen when she was put in charge. “Was Martin good to you?”

  “Martin was a wizard, not a warlock, and he found most of my powers disturbing. But he understood what it was to be a changeling and helped me come to terms with that. He also admired my intelligence, which I come by honestly. I understand my sister and brother are clever as well.”

  “You don’t know your siblings?”

  She shook her head. “We aren’t family; even our blood is not the same. If I consider anyone family, I suppose it’s Teo. He came to the Project a few months before I did, under similar circumstances.”