Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “There we go,” Tjuan said. “Spit it out.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want,” I said. “I won’t get it.”

  “That don’t mean I won’t enjoy hearing you ask. Make it good and I might let you in.”

  I stood on a precipice with only the dimmest idea of how important it was: not just to the case, but to myself as a human being. I felt the kind of fear I should have felt a year ago, looking down from a seven-story building. But this time I had to step forward. Some part of me had grown enough to know I wouldn’t shatter, even if it felt like I would.

  “I want forgiveness,” I said.

  I’m not sure who was more shocked, Tjuan by my answer, or me by his look of shock. I could have pushed him over with two fingers and walked into the house.

  “What did you think I was going to say?”

  “Hell if I know,” he said. “Something in that suitcase of yours.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Forgiveness is the name of the romance novel I was reading. I’m dying to know how it ends.”

  “Get your ass in here,” he said, stepping back and opening the door wider. “But if you want forgiveness, bark up some other tree.”

  “Why is that?” I said warily.

  “’Cause I never really gave a shit,” he said, and then disappeared into the dining room. I stood near the front door, listening to the sounds of eating and chatter, and wondered if Tjuan was about to announce my presence. I couldn’t bring myself to go charging into the idyllic meal in progress. Damn it smelled good, though. My brain picked that moment to dredge up the look on Teo’s face the last time I’d seen him.

  Monty appeared from around the corner of the couch, arching his back in a tippy-toe stretch and eyeing me coyly.

  “Hey, handsome,” I said. “Missed you.” He came over and butted his head against both of my prosthetics to declare me his property, then sauntered off with his crooked tail in the air.

  After a few minutes I felt a familiar tingling shock as Elliott collided forcefully with my chest. I tried blindly to catch him, but by the time my hands moved, I could already feel him on my shoulder. I made a soothing sound, then saw Caryl leaning against the cased opening that led to the dining room.

  “What brings you here?” she said, tugging on the cuff of one of her gloves. “I hardly give credit to Tjuan’s enigmatic pronouncements about absolution.”

  “Vivian’s having Berenbaum and Rivenholt construct a Gate somewhere on the new studio property in Manhattan Beach.”

  Elliot tumbled off my shoulder. “Go on,” said Caryl.

  “Probably on one of the soundstages, but it will take fey glasses to find out which one has been warded.”

  “I assume you are basing this theory on something other than your very fruitful imagination?”

  “Shipments of graphite and diamond to the studio. I talked to Baroness Foxfeather, and she found it plausible that Berenbaum and Rivenholt might have been able to undertake the construction.”

  “Building a Gate without the supervision of the Arcadia Project is a violation of the Accord.”

  “Which means you’re fully authorized to kick their asses. I’d really like to see that, but I understand if you don’t want me there.”

  There was a long silence. Reading nothing from Caryl, I looked for Elliott, but of course I couldn’t see him.

  I looked back at Caryl. “I’m sorry if—”

  “Don’t waste time with apologies. I can feel stress fractures in the construct as it is.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You believe that Claybriar is your Echo?”

  “He’s the one who drew the pictures, including that one of me, and he seemed familiar to me the first time I laid eyes on him.”

  “Almost without exception, Echoes tend to be nobility, but we’ve had reason to believe Claybriar was a special case. If he is in fact your Echo, we will need you to accompany us, because you may serve as an additional help in locating him.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Also, if he is your Echo, we will need to register you both properly.”

  She was all business, but from the feel of it, Elliott was now clinging to my neck. “For God’s sake, Caryl, how am I supposed to just ignore your feelings?”

  “In theory,” said Caryl, “you could do what everyone in the Project seems able to do: recognize that if I wanted my emotions noticed and commented upon, I would wear them like everyone else. But as this concept seems impossible for you to grasp, I will remove myself and my familiar to another room. Given the current instability of our relations with Arcadia, it would be unwise for me to spend time there recharging from the loss if emotional overload causes a rupture in my spellwork.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth,” I said, “I missed you, too.”

  Caryl just spread her hands in a vague gesture of resignation, then turned and headed for the stairs. “Get a pair of glasses from Song,” she called back as she walked away, “and tell Teo you’ll be assisting us. When the two of you are finished fighting, come to your former room, and the five of us will discuss our strategy.”

  “Five?”

  “Gloria and Tjuan will be coming as well.”

  “Caryl—” I began. But as usual, she’d already made her exit.

  43

  I figured of the two awkward reunions, the one with Song would be the least fraught, so I headed to her room with my most ingratiating smile. I found her sitting in a handmade rocker with her baby leaning half-asleep into the crook of her arm. I could have sworn he was twice as fat as the last time I’d seen him.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hello,” she returned quietly, glancing meaningfully toward the sleeping baby. There was a tense undercurrent to her usual passiveness that told me she’d put me in the “potential abuser” category. I couldn’t feel particularly slandered; if the shoe fits, kick yourself with it.

  “Caryl sent me here for a pair of fey glasses,” I said, lowering my voice to match hers. At Song’s dubious look I added, “I’m not hired back. I’m just helping with one last thing.”

  “They’re in the top drawer,” she murmured, pointing with her chin toward a dresser at the back of the room.

  I moved as stealthily as my prosthetics allowed. “Your baby’s looking healthy,” I half whispered. “What’s his name?”

  “Sterling,” she replied.

  There was nothing I could reply that wouldn’t reek of insincerity, so I just found myself a pair of glasses and tried out the fit. They pinched the bridge of my nose a little, but it wasn’t as though I’d be keeping them.

  “I’ll bring these back as soon as—” My words dried up as I turned back toward the rocker.

  The baby in Song’s arms was glowing, and not just with contentment. The fey glasses revealed the swirling eddies of golden light that moved over his skin like vapor over dry ice. “Holy shit,” I breathed.

  Song turned and gave me a wan smile. “Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

  “Why is the baby—” I stopped, remembering that this household’s mysteries had never been mine to know. “Right; it’s none of my business.”

  Song gave a soft shrug, not meeting my eyes. “His father was fey. I didn’t know about Arcadia then.” She looked uncertain about saying more.

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She still wasn’t looking at me, and she didn’t say good-bye as I left.

  Teo was in the kitchen, carefully wrapping up leftovers in foil while Stevie scrubbed pots. As usual, Stevie glanced at me and said nothing. Teo didn’t see me at first, and I just leaned on the doorway, feeling a rush of tenderness for him that I knew would disappear the minute he opened his mouth.

  I’d have to break the silence with something spectacularly lovable if I was going to survive the ensuing conversation
, so I tried to quarantine my crazy away from the rest of me. Picturing my own little construct, I imagined stuffing my rage and lust and fear and self-loathing into it, leaving only the person I would have been if someone hadn’t put my brain in backward.

  “I’m sorry, Teo,” I said, and bit down hard on my tongue before I could add all the explanations, the justifications, the mitigating circumstances that crowded into my throat at the sound of my own words.

  “I don’t care,” said Teo, snapping the lid on a plastic container and taking it to the fridge.

  “I’m still sorry,” I said, trying not to be devastated at how little I had reaped from that massive act of self-mastery.

  “And I still don’t care,” he said. “Either words mean something or they don’t, and either way, you’re fucked. You and I are done.”

  “Actually, we’re not done, which is what I came to tell you. Caryl needs my help to wrap up this situation with Rivenholt and the census anomaly.”

  “I am not working with you again,” he said flatly.

  “Teo, I lashed out at you, and there isn’t anything that will make that better. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hate you right then, but it’s also not everything there is to know about how I feel.”

  “I really don’t care how you feel.” He turned around, leaning against the fridge. Stevie just kept right on washing pots. “I honestly was never into you,” he said. “I don’t find you attractive, and it’s not just your scars or whatever. You’re like, thirty, and your hair is too short, and you dress like crap.”

  “I’m twenty-six. And you kind of flirted.”

  “Who else am I supposed to flirt with? Caryl? That’s like talking to a brick wall. I swear on my father’s grave, you don’t do anything for me. At all.”

  “I’m okay with that,” I said. And I was, which was kind of weird, since I had always hung a lot of my self-esteem on whether or not men found me worthy of insemination. I didn’t really have the time to look deeply into this breakthrough, because Teo still had more he wanted to unload on me.

  “I don’t mind people being crazy,” he said. “I understand rage and depression and saying stuff you regret. But when I do it, I’m just a dumb dog snapping his teeth. What I don’t like about you is that even when you’re being nice, even when things are good, you’re checking out people’s weaknesses, storing things up to hurt them with later. You can’t be trusted. Not ever.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But for the same reason you can’t trust me to be your friend, you can trust me to work out the weaknesses in a problem and solve it. Caryl wants everyone upstairs for a meeting when you’re finished being mad at me.”

  “Don’t talk about this like it’s a mood swing,” Teo said. “Sometimes things are just broken.” He was calm in a way I hadn’t seen before, and it gave me an uneasy feeling.

  I opened and shut my mouth a couple of times, and then a little voice piped up behind me. An actual voice, not one of the many in my head.

  “Shame on you, Teo!”

  Oh, for God’s sake. “Gloria, I didn’t see you there,” I said. Yeah, this time I was being an asshole.

  Gloria seemed too focused on scolding Teo to notice. “Forgiveness is our duty as Christians,” she told him.

  “So is not stabbing people,” said Teo.

  “I know how hard it is to forgive,” Gloria went on blithely. Apparently she’d recently armored over that weak spot. “But hon, the only way to be a better person than those who hurt you is to forgive them and show them kindness.”

  “Teo doesn’t have to try that hard to be a better person than either of us.”

  Gloria turned her sleepy-lidded blue eyes up to mine and smiled with beatific sweetness. “God forgives you for the things you said to me,” she said. “And so do I. And if Teo were half the man he thinks he is, he would be strong enough to forgive you too.”

  Teo snorted. “Fuck you, Gloria.”

  “Hey!” I snapped.

  Gloria gave me a surprised smile, then turned back to Teo, looking ready to start into another lecture.

  “Don’t waste your breath,” I said. “I forgive him for not forgiving me, okay? Now I think we’re all wanted upstairs.”

  When I went up to the room I’d spent a few nights in, I was shocked to see that somehow in the past day it had been filled with new furniture. Caryl seemed in the process of converting it into an office space, all desks and bookshelves and filing cabi­nets. At the moment she sat writing in a notebook, her back to the door.

  “Jeez,” I said. “You guys wasted no time.”

  Tjuan shouldered his way past me into the room, nearly making my prosthetic knee buckle under the unexpected weight I threw onto it. “And who do you think had to carry all that shit up the stairs?” he said. “I guess it’s always good to have a colored boy around to do the hard labor.”

  “Not to spoil another of your rants,” said Teo, coming in behind him, “but I think maybe it had more to do with you being about eleven feet tall.”

  “How is that my fault?” he countered. “Maybe Gloria wanted to help move furniture. Did anyone ask her?”

  “Ask me what, sweetheart?” Gloria was the last one in, perhaps on account of not being able to take the stairs quite as easily as Tjuan wanted us to believe.

  “Get your lazy ass in here,” said Tjuan. Gloria grinned at him like he’d called her gorgeous. Even if I’d had the dubious privilege of living here a decade, I seriously doubted I would ever understand these people.

  We settled around a small table that had only four chairs. Caryl elected to stand, removing any awkwardness that would have arisen from one of the men having to give up his seat to me.

  Closing her notebook with a soft snap, Caryl looked at us for a moment, then spoke in her usual bored tone. “We have reason to believe that the census anomaly is caused by fey that are being held in flux somehow via an incomplete Gate at the Valiant Studios construction site. We need to find a way onto the property, locate the Gate, and free the trapped Arcadian citizens.”

  “Are you going with us?” Teo asked Caryl.

  “I am.”

  “Then the breaking and entering will be no problem, right? You can just make us invisible and do that thing you do to doors.”

  “I imagine the external gate to the property is made of metal, not wood, so I cannot decompose it. As for ‘invisibility,’ I’m afraid with my familiar in use I cannot afford the expenditure of energy required to cast a group enchantment.”

  “Do you have to bring Elliott?” Gloria asked.

  “Without my familiar, I fear I would be more hindrance than help, due to the stressful nature of the enterprise.”

  “I can take care of getting us onto the lot,” I said. Everyone turned to look at me. “Inaya can just drive us right in.”

  Caryl eyed me. “And just how exactly are you planning to explain to Inaya that you need access to her construction site in the wee hours of the morning?”

  “I told her everything,” I said.

  “What?” cried Teo and Gloria in alarmed unison.

  “Foxfeather met Inaya this morning, and apparently they’re Echoes, so it’s not like Arcadia is a big secret to Inaya anymore. She had information I needed, so I set up a meeting with her.” I conveniently left out the order in which those events had occurred, but even so, Teo smacked a palm to his forehead, and Tjuan shook his head slowly with a look of profound disapproval.

  “I will second Millie’s ‘relax,’ believe it or not,” Caryl said. “Her employment has already been terminated, and I am already due for disciplinary measures. We may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, particularly when there is a chance to obtain some crucial intelligence about Vivian’s plans. She’s been building to something for years.”

  “Why’s National pickin’ on you, Caryl?” Gloria said, sitting forward in he
r chair. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “This is not the time to debate the responsibilities inherent in management,” said Caryl. “Prepare yourselves for a bit of trespassing. The danger should be minimal; if we are somehow caught by their private security, I will recover my familiar’s energy and enchant our way out of it. But let us hope that is unnecessary, as I will be dead weight after that at best. On a related note, can someone please get Martin’s cat out of here?”

  I wasn’t sure how that was related, but Monty was indeed sniffing around a filing cabinet near the door. Tjuan obligingly rose and removed him, much to my disappointment.

  “Be prepared to defend yourselves,” Caryl went on, “in case I am unable to help you.”

  “Self-defense is not really my thing,” I said. “I’m kind of pleased that I’ve mastered self-locomotion.”

  Tjuan sat back down, mumbling something that I was entirely sure I misheard.

  “Huh?” I said in astonishment.

  “I said I’ve got your back. Don’t make it a thing.”

  “Actually,” said Teo, “Millie brings up a good point. Isn’t bringing her asking for, like, three kinds of trouble?”

  “She is our compass,” said Caryl. “She will likely feel drawn to Claybriar’s location.”

  “Fey glasses,” said Teo. “We just look around for a ward that screams ‘keep out,’ and we’ll be fine.”

  “I’m going,” I said flatly to Teo. “He’s my Echo. You of all people should understand.”

  “Don’t you say a goddamned word about my Echo,” he said. “I understand fine; I just don’t care.”

  Caryl cleared her throat. “If the two of you wish to bicker further, please do it after we’ve completed our objective. Teo, the advantage of having someone along who can direct us and potentially dispel wards outweighs the disadvantages of her physical and emotional handicaps.”

  “If she’s going,” said Teo, “I’m not.”

  “Very well,” said Caryl. “You are dismissed.”

  I tried not to laugh at Teo’s expression but didn’t quite succeed.