Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “Forgetting about possible and impossible for a moment, just suppose there are half a dozen fey somewhere, trapped between worlds and with, like, IVs hooked up to them, drawing out their essence. How long until they’d be completely drained?”

  “Hypothetically speaking again, I assume?”

  “Yes, in theory, how long could you drain them like that?”

  “Forever.”

  I sat there with the phone to my ear, one kind of horror transmuting slowly to another. “Forever as in . . . ?”

  “Forever as in, as long as both worlds stand.”

  41

  On the bright side, I had plenty of time to arrange a rescue, but I was a little too hung up on the whole “eternity of torture” thing to celebrate. I leaned my head back against the wall of the game shop, feeling dizzy. Across the alley, a gray patchwork of paint marked an ongoing attempt to cover graffiti on the side of the strip club.

  “Millie,” came Caryl’s calm voice on the phone. “If you have information that can help us resolve this situation, withholding it benefits no one.”

  “It benefits me,” I snapped. “I can find Claybriar without helping the people who threw an unemployed cripple out on the street.”

  “I do regret the way that was handled,” Caryl said.

  “You mean, the way you didn’t handle it? The way you passed the buck to Song, someone I could actually hurt, because you couldn’t be bothered to look me in the eye?”

  “The reasons for my absence were sound, but you are not in the proper frame of mind to understand or even hear them. And I am afraid I need to end this conversation.”

  Fear of abandonment is one of the worst Borderline ­triggers, and I was already as unraveled as I’d ever been.

  “Why?” I demanded, smothering panic with anger. “So you can go suck up to Berenbaum? The guy who dropped me on his driveway like a trash bag? I’ve tried so hard for you, and yet when I make one mistake, you—”

  “Which mistake do you mean?” Caryl’s words came out fast and inflectionless. “Do you mean causing thousands of dollars’ worth of property damage and immeasurable personal insult to a man who has poured millions into the Arcadia Project? Or do you mean physically assaulting your partner on your first day? Perhaps you are referring to the addictive painkillers in your suitcase, or your act of self-injury while a guest on Project property, or trespassing in a client’s hotel room, or posing as a licensed private investigator during an unauthorized phone call to a high-profile individual outside the Project’s jurisdiction? Do let me know which of those was your ‘one mistake,’ as it will make an interesting footnote to the report I must give my direct superior when she flies in next week from New Orleans to determine whether my lapse of judgment in hiring you indicates that I need to be replaced.”

  Remorse is not something anyone feels easily. At heart, it comes from the recognition that you have done something beneath your worth. From a Borderline’s perspective, nothing is beneath her worth, because she has no worth. A person with no worth can’t hope for forgiveness, and so the only way to climb out of the purgatory of endless guilt is either to protest innocence or to drown out your own sins with the (invented if necessary) sins of your accuser.

  I couldn’t do either of those things. I wasn’t innocent of the charges, Caryl had been doing her job, and there was no reason on earth that anyone should forgive me. I couldn’t even kill myself, because I had learned how horribly that kind of violence ricocheted into the lives of blameless strangers. There was nothing I could do that wouldn’t serve as further proof of my worthlessness.

  Suddenly I wanted Monty. I wanted him like a child wants a red balloon now once its string has slipped out of her hand. I hung up the phone and slowly sat down in the alley.

  Dissociation is one of the rarer Borderline symptoms, brought on by severe stress. It’s different from person to person, but it had happened to me at Professor Scott’s place, and it happened to me there again in the alley. I just left my body for a little while, the way you might leave a room when it’s too full of smoke to breathe.

  People walked by; I could hear them. One even commented to his companion about me as they passed.

  I heard a phone ring, and absently wondered why no one was answering. Eventually, the ringing stopped.

  A nicely dressed woman held out some money and said, “Here, sweetheart, get something to eat.” I wasn’t sure who she was talking to.

  The phone started ringing again. It occurred to me that it was probably my phone, and I should answer it. I just had no concept of how to make that happen, how to move my arm, how to form words of greeting.

  It was the chill that eventually brought me back. As the shadows deepened I started to shiver, and the movement of my muscles gave me context for my consciousness. I was sitting in something cold. It took me a moment to realize I had wet myself.

  “Christ, Roper,” I said aloud, words coming out drowsy and slurred. “New low.” I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to walk into the street with the kind of stains you usually find on a five-year-old. I didn’t know what to do.

  Dazed, I checked my voice mail. Two messages: a man trying to set up an apartment showing, and Inaya asking for a call back. Caryl’s number didn’t appear on my incoming call list, a fact that cut sharply. Pain was good, though; pain was something.

  After somewhat drowsy deliberation, I tried Inaya.

  “Hey, honey,” she said after two rings. “I’m at Vicki’s place.”

  “Inaya, I’ve had a sort of accident.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I have a condition. It’s usually not serious, but I had an episode, and I need someone to come get me.”

  “Do you need me to call you an ambulance?”

  “No, I’m physically fine. But it’s just . . . I fainted, I guess, and I kind of . . . had a bladder mishap, and now I’m hiding in an alley in West Hollywood, too embarrassed to come out.”

  “Oh my God, you poor thing. I’m going to send Rosa, okay? She’s really sweet; she’s like your grandma. She’ll take care of everything. Just tell me where you are.”

  As it turned out, Rosa was nothing like my late grandmother, which is to say she was not a racist alcoholic with brown teeth. She was not Latina, either, as I had embarrassingly expected. She looked Scandinavian. She didn’t say much beyond hello at first, but she gave me a small blanket to wrap around my waist and escorted me briskly and compassionately to her waiting sedan.

  “Thank you so much,” I said miserably.

  “Once,” she said after a brief silence, “I got very drunk at a party and got terrible stomach cramps, so I ran to the bathroom and had a bowel movement, but I had forgotten to open up the toilet lid first.”

  I have no idea why that made me feel better, but it did.

  • • •

  I’d love go back in time and pay a visit to twenty-four-year-old Millicent Roper, maniacally optimistic UCLA film student, and tell her that in a couple of years she’d be wearing a pair of urine-soaked jeans into a fairy’s apartment to meet Inaya West. She’d probably back slowly away with one hand on her pepper spray.

  “I need a washcloth, a sink, a plastic trash bag, and some fresh clothes,” I said in a brisk director voice as soon as I walked in the door, hoping to distract from how thoroughly pathetic I was.

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Foxfeather, and scampered to a back room, possibly the same one she and her friends had been having sex in two days ago. She seemed strangely focused; was it her Echo’s influence already?

  I hung back near the front door, unwilling to inflict the smell of urine on a woman who had probably not walked her own dogs in decades. Inaya was sitting sideways on a love seat that faced the far window, looking over the back of it at me.

  “Sorry if I interrupted anything, uh, intimate,” I said awkwardly.

&n
bsp; Inaya frowned. “Is it usually like that with people and their . . .”

  “Echoes? I don’t think so. But I figured you two would, what with you being so gorgeous and Foxfeather being so . . . Foxfeather.”

  Inaya shook her head slowly. “She sees me as a little girl, someone to protect.”

  “What a waste,” I muttered.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  Foxfeather came out from the bedroom then with a washcloth and some sort of unidentifiable garment. She fetched a plastic trash bag from under the sink as well, proving that her short-term memory was functioning at an unprecedented level.

  “Do you want me to help you clean up?” she said.

  I glanced at Inaya, who raised an eyebrow at me, quelling my train of thought. Probably not a good idea to drag the good Christian’s soul mate into the other room for a little inter­species fondling.

  “I’ll be fine on my own,” I said, and awkwardly shuffled my way to the master bathroom.

  One careful sponge bath later, I emerged back into the main room draped in a loose-fitting babydoll dress. It would have been stunning on Foxfeather, but it was a little ridiculous on me given the amount of titanium and scar tissue I was showing.

  “So let’s talk business,” said Inaya, propping her pedicured bare feet up on the coffee table. Foxfeather, now seated on the love seat next to her, playfully mimicked her pose. I moved around to seat myself in a cushy leather chair that was placed at an angle to the two of them.

  “I’ll try to keep this simple,” I said. “Best I can figure out, Vivian and David have a bunch of fey commoners captive somewhere and are draining their blood to work some magic at their new studio. I need your help to figure out where these prisoners are being held.”

  “No way,” Inaya said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “David wouldn’t do that.”

  I sighed. “I would have thought the same thing, Inaya, but he’s not the man everyone thinks he is.”

  Inaya’s spine straightened, and her face took on a haughty expression of bruised loyalty that made me crave better lighting and a camera. “I have known him for thirty years,” she said. “I don’t remember not knowing him. He would not torture innocent people.”

  “She said commoners, love,” interjected Foxfeather, patting Inaya’s arm. “They’re not people.”

  “If one more person says that,” I growled, “I swear to God I am going to go on a killing spree.”

  “Commoners don’t have feelings,” Foxfeather told me with patient condescension, as though I were worrying about my teddy bear getting lonely.

  “Bullshit,” I replied. “I’ve seen Claybriar’s art, and he is up to his pointy little horns in feelings. Just because he’s not as pretty as you, that doesn’t mean he’s not a person.”

  “David wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Inaya reiterated, hugging herself. Her expression reminded me of myself in the Berenbaums’ garage right before I started smashing things, so I quickly groped for consoling words.

  “I’m sure Vivian and Johnny have been feeding David the same bullshit about commoners that Foxfeather is feeding us right now,” I said. It didn’t excuse him, but I hoped it explained the seeming paradox enough that Inaya could accept it.

  She just stared at me.

  “All I know,” I went on, “is that the three of them are involved in imprisoning these fairies, and I’m pretty sure it’s to harvest their essence, their blood. Given how deeply you’re involved in the studio, I thought you might have information that could help me piece things together.”

  Inaya caught her lower lip between her teeth and furrowed her brow in the sexiest display of intense thought I’d ever seen. “Is there any way this could involve diamonds?” she said after a moment.

  I leaned forward. “You know something weird. Tell me.”

  “I’m the one who approves the expenses,” she said. “A while back, David ordered a load of synthetic diamonds and some other weird shit, and when I asked why, he babbled about new technology and how it was complicated and time-sensitive and I should just give it my stamp of approval. Technology isn’t my area, so I did. You have no idea how much I trust this man.”

  “No, no, I get it,” I said. “After less than a week, I was ready to give him power of attorney.”

  Inaya put her head in her hands, slumping forward, and Foxfeather rubbed slow circles on her back. I pictured Claybriar doing the same to me. Then I pictured the steel in my body leaching the essence from his veins. So much for that.

  “Synthetic diamonds and what else?” I said.

  “Graphite, you know, the stuff in pencils? But in huge quantities.”

  Something clicked together in my memory. I stared out the window, barely noticing the hazy view of the Hollywood sign. “They’re building a Gate.”

  42

  A new Gate, on the Valiant Studios lot. Elliott would do a flip if I told Caryl, but I wasn’t planning on talking to Caryl again in this lifetime.

  “How is this possible?” I addressed my question to Foxfeather, appreciating the irony that she was the most reliable source of information in the room. “I thought the trick to building Gates was lost a hundred years ago or something.”

  “It was,” she said, nodding like a bobblehead doll. “The last pair has been dead for ever so long. And they were one in a zillion.”

  I moved past the dubious statistic and repeated, “Pair?”

  “Well, yes, you have to have one person on each side, Echoes, you know, because each piece has to go in the exact same place. They have to see through each other’s eyes while they work.”

  “I take it not all Echoes can do that?”

  “That kind of bond takes lots of time. Most humans find their Echoes too late and die too soon.”

  “Would forty years together be enough?” I asked. When Foxfeather looked blank, I clarified, “Half a human lifetime.”

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “It’s David and Johnny,” I said. “Has to be.”

  This bugged me. Not so much the part about David being the lynchpin of an evil scheme—I had already tucked that away in the coping section of my brain—but the part where the guy at the head of this shiny new studio project just so happened to be the only human in a century who could construct a Gate.

  “This can’t be about the studio,” I said. “Vivian wanted a Gate for some other reason. I think she came up with the studio idea to entice David into building it. Depending on how long she’s been planning this, it may be why she went into entertainment in the first place.”

  Inaya rubbed her eyes as though they ached. “So what do we do?”

  “I need you to help me figure out where on the premises this Gate might be, because I think Vivian found a way to use it to imprison the commoners. It’s almost certainly glamoured like the bookstore, so you’ll avoid it or not notice it. Is there any part of the lot you tend to ignore or shy away from?”

  Inaya shook her head. “My dad’s in construction, so I’m fussy; I was always inspecting every inch of the site to make sure the contractors David hired didn’t screw things up. I can’t think of any place I haven’t combed over unless it’s one of the soundstages.”

  “A soundstage would be a perfect place to hide a Gate,” I said. “Plenty of room, easy to isolate and keep locked, easy to glamour so people think it’s in use or whatever and don’t go inside.”

  “There are a dozen of them,” Inaya said, “and I don’t have those keys.”

  I thought for a moment. “Crap,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a really easy way to do this, but it’s also the hard way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m about to eat so much crow I’ll be stopping up toilets with feathers for a week.”

&n
bsp; • • •

  I waited until dinnertime, when Caryl was most likely to be at the Residence. I paid the cabdriver extra and told him to leave if I wasn’t back in fifteen minutes; my reasoning was that Caryl would either welcome me back or kick me off the property right away.

  I knocked on the door, praying that the person to answer would be someone likely to let me in. When I saw Tjuan push aside the curtain, I sighed and turned back toward the cab. Just as I was heading for the porch steps, I heard the bolt come off the door. Tjuan opened it a foot or so and stood in the doorway, much as I had once stood to block Ellis.

  “You have got balls of brass,” he said in a way that made my palms sweat.

  I kept a smile on. “Actually, that’s one of the few metal bits they did not install when they were putting me back together.”

  He discharged a short sound that might have been a laugh.

  “Can I come in?” I said. “I’ve pretty much solved this Riven­holt business for Caryl, and I want to tell her what I found.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s the truth, I swear on my Echo’s life. Which is, by the way, being made unimaginably horrible in an interdimensional prison while we’re standing here chatting.”

  “Also bullshit.”

  “At this point, wouldn’t it be easier just to slam the door in my face?”

  “I’m trying to find out what it is you’re really after so I know whether I should beat you to death with your own leg first.”

  I looked at him for a long time and came to the tentative conclusion that this was humor. God but I hoped so.

  I said, “How can I decrease my chances of such an outcome?”

  “By laying off the bullshit and telling me what you really want. Think before you answer.”

  I battled righteous irritation for a moment. How was I supposed to convince Mr. Paranoid that something other than the truth was the truth, when the truth itself hadn’t convinced him?

  Then I realized he hadn’t asked me why I’d come. He had asked me what I wanted. I cast around in my mind for the simplest answer, and when I found it a lump came to my throat.