Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one amused. “Someone got his bluff called!” sang Gloria.

  “Was that a bluff?” said Caryl. “I would prefer not to waste time with such things. If you delay us further with your grievances, Teo, I’m afraid I will have to leave you behind regardless of your preferences.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Teo. “Forget I said anything. I’m fine. I’ll go.”

  “I want you all to listen to me very carefully,” Caryl said in a tone that brought me to full attention. “This rescue attempt must be done entirely by the book. Our book. We will break human laws if we must, but the laws of the Accord will not be bent, bruised, or in any way trifled with. I understand that in this country it is considered harmless, even admirable, to flout authority for its own sake, but when it comes to maintaining balance between two worlds, the rules are not arbitrary, and I am the authority here. I do not want to have to give an order twice, and I do not want to be questioned. Is that perfectly clear?”

  A chorus of assent followed her question, though Teo’s response was sullen. He was normally the first one spouting the rulebook at people too. I was going to have to find a time to figure out what was really eating him. Even I wasn’t narcissistic enough to think that our argument could put him in this deep of a funk.

  “When are we heading out there?” I said.

  “Now,” said Caryl.

  44

  “Now?” echoed Teo in disbelief.

  “What did I say about giving orders twice, Teo?”

  Teo scowled, rising from his chair. “Did it ever occur to you that some of us might have social lives or something? I gotta go make a phone call.”

  “Sit,” said Caryl. “Your phone is in your pocket, and I don’t want to waste more time herding stray sheep.”

  I took a cue from that and dialed Inaya, hoping she’d be as cooperative as I’d implied. I greeted her by name when she answered, glancing around the room to make sure everyone noticed. Teo wasn’t paying any attention, of course; he had his own phone out.

  “I need you to get us on the lot tonight,” I said to Inaya.

  “No problem.”

  “There are a bunch of us, so we might want a van or something.”

  “We have a van,” interrupted Caryl.

  “Never mind the van,” I said. “We’ll come pick you up, and then you can just deal with security and keys or whatever when we get there.”

  She replied something about private security, but I lost most of it because Teo’s voice had risen to a distracting volume, as though he were talking to someone in a noisy bar.

  “A bunch of people from my stupid job are going down to Manhattan Beach tonight,” he was saying, “and they decided to drag me along. We’ll have to have that drink later.”

  “Could you hold just a moment, Inaya?” I said as sweetly as I could, and then put my hand over the phone. “Teo,” I said. “Can you lower your voice, please?”

  Teo flipped me the bird.

  I turned to Caryl, gritting my teeth. “Can we not just leave him here?”

  Caryl rubbed at one of her temples with gloved fingertips in a long-suffering way that made it easy to forget she was the youngest person in the room. “I will keep Teo under control,” she said. “Can I trust you to do the same for yourself?”

  I wasn’t entirely sure that I could, but I nodded. Act as if ye have faith, and all that.

  “Sorry, Inaya,” I said, putting the phone back to my ear. “You think you can get us past the security?”

  “Oh, I can do better than that,” she said. “Just relax and I’ll show you some real magic.”

  • • •

  Our ride was an unmarked white van with tinted windows—not suspicious at all. Inaya rode shotgun, and Teo made a point of squeezing between Tjuan and Gloria in the back bench seat rather than taking the more comfortable captain’s chair next to mine. Poor Gloria got up with a sigh and took the chair instead. I watched Caryl calmly maneuvering the great white whale through evening traffic, and it occurred to me that when she had been appointed head of the Los Angeles Arcadia Project, she had been too young to drive without an adult in the car.

  “Caryl,” I said, “how dangerous is this, really?”

  “I do not know what safeguards they have set up around the Gate,” she said, “but if they are linked to Vivian’s essence and you cannot fully dispel them, we will leave them be. I have no desire to get anyone hurt tonight, especially with National’s eyes on me.”

  “Hope your probation works out better than mine did.”

  Inaya directed us to the studio’s main entry gate; there was enough room to pull in out of the main flow of street traffic before stopping in front of the unmanned guard booth and drop arm. There was a smaller pedestrian gate to the side; as soon as we stopped, Inaya hopped out and pulled out a set of keys, trying one at a time in the lock. I carefully maneuvered myself into the front passenger’s seat of the van so I could watch and listen.

  An energetic young blond guy approached her almost immediately. “Ms. West,” he said with a playful salute. “What brings you here at this hour?”

  “Hmmmmm,” she said, considering him. “Can you keep a secret?”

  Caryl shifted in the driver’s seat. “Millie—”

  “Trust the lady,” I said.

  The guard was leaning against the gate in what I imagine he thought was a suave pose. “Keeping things safe is my job, Ms. West.”

  Inaya gave him a slow, sly grin. Foxfeather must have recently sprinkled her with fairy dust or something, because even from my angle, that smile set loose a cascade of butterflies in my stomach.

  “I’m having a . . . private party for some friends here tonight,” Inaya said. “But we might be doing some things that aren’t strictly, you know—” She paused to make a puff-puff gesture with her elegant fingertips.

  “Right,” said the guard.

  “I don’t want you guys in trouble about it, so I’m giving you the night off, full pay. Can you radio the others? I want everybody gone till morning. That should give us enough time to clean up, and we can all just pretend this never happened.”

  The guard gave her another salute. “Sure thing, Ms. West.”

  “Can you lift up the gate for us?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Caryl called out to her.

  Inaya looked confused but sent the security guard on his way. I retreated from the front of the van as she climbed back in. “Okay,” she said. “What exactly are you planning to do with the van?”

  “I was hoping you would drive it away for us,” said Caryl.

  “If you think I’m not going to help set those poor people free,” Inaya said, “you are out of your mind.”

  From behind me, I heard a derisive snort from Tjuan. It was comforting to see that Teo was right; Tjuan apparently found everyone irksome.

  “Inaya,” said Caryl calmly, “I need you to drive the van away from here. It is huge and all but glows in the dark, and stealth may be required. We will call you when we need you to bring it back.”

  “Tell me you did not just Miss Daisy me.”

  Caryl and Inaya locked eyes. I could almost see the sparks of Inaya’s steel striking Caryl’s flint. If it had been a movie, they’d have lunged forward and started kissing, but instead Inaya sighed and threw up her hands.

  “It’s your show, I guess,” Inaya said. “But you and I are going to have words later.”

  She let us through the pedestrian gate before climbing back into the van and driving away. We all slipped on our fey glasses and scanned the darkened lot.

  “Teo, stop fidgeting,” said Caryl dryly. “Millie, do you see anything? Feel anything?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Then just start walking.”

  I sighed, vastly uncomfortable. The last time I ha
d let my intuition guide me, it had guided me off a roof. At the moment I felt nothing in particular, so I picked a random direction.

  “Squeak, squeak,” said Teo.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “We’re a bunch of lemmings headed for a ledge.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe my knee needed oiling.”

  “Are you seriously critiquing my lemming sounds?”

  “Are you seriously making falling-off-a-ledge jokes?”

  Caryl’s gloved hand landed on the back of my neck, hard, and from the sound Teo made, I could only assume her other hand was on him somewhere. “Stop it,” she said, and then took her hands away quickly. “If you persist in bickering,” she said, “so help me I will give you both cancer.”

  I looked over at Teo in alarm and mouthed, “Can she do that?” He just nodded, eyes wide. We both elected to shut up at that point.

  By luck or fate, my general direction turned out to be correct. As soundstages go, stage 13 wasn’t particularly large, maybe a hundred by two hundred feet, and thirty feet high, topped by a gently peaked roof. Its main distinguishing feature was the intricate fractal web of Unseelie magic that pulsed and writhed around it. Even from a distance, even knowing what I was looking at, it took every ounce of my self-control to resist the siren call of Move Along, Nothing to See Here.

  “Thirteen? Really?” said Teo.

  “Most lots don’t even have a Stage Thirteen,” I said.

  Caryl was studying Vivian’s spellwork so intently that even without expression it was easy to read her admiration. “I think that’s sort of the joke,” she said absently.

  “Can you unlock it?” Teo asked.

  “If we can find an entrance with the proper amount of wood around the door latch, then yes. But I don’t have enough power to rust metal unless I dissolve Elliott, and we all know why that’s a terrible idea.”

  We circled the hangarlike structure until Caryl found a likely looking door at the top of a small flight of steps. She approached and gave it an exploratory touch with gloved finger­tips.

  All at once she recoiled with a cry and pressed a hand to her chest. She turned and staggered down the steps toward us, leaning heavily on the rail with the hand that wasn’t curled into the fabric of her blouse.

  “What is it?” I asked her in alarm.

  She replied with a labored inhale, then released the rail just in time to politely cover a barrage of wet coughs. When she withdrew her hand, her glove was spattered with red.

  “Oh, fuck,” I blurted, backing up a couple of steps.

  Teo, on the other hand, rushed toward her. In his panic he must have completely lost his senses, because he put his hand on the nape of her neck, where her tightly bound hair left her skin exposed. Her familiar had just a slice of a second to look terrified before flying into a thousand pieces.

  “Elliott!” I called out stupidly as his fragments dissipated like smoke.

  Caryl stumbled a few feet away from Teo, drawing in quick, shallow breaths. Then she sank down on the pavement and clawed at her chest. “Stupid, stupid, stupid . . . ,” she gasped. “I shouldn’t have touched it!”

  Teo knelt next to her. “Carrie, it’s okay. It’s not your—”

  “And you shouldn’t have touched me!” She rounded on him, savagery lending her damaged voice a genuinely frightening snarl. This set off another paroxysm of coughing; this time both gloves turned gory. Teo stepped back, speechless for once.

  “Well,” said Tjuan, standing very still. “Now we’re fucked.”

  “We are under no circumstances fucked,” I said firmly. I took a couple of steps toward Caryl, who was struggling to take deep, even breaths. “Caryl,” I said. “What exactly happened at the door?”

  “Metaspell.” She spoke urgently, snatching a breath between every few words. “I should have . . . seen the curse, but it was . . . it was lost in . . . all that warding. . . .”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” she said, looking up at me with tear-filled eyes. “I’m going to die.”

  45

  Terror tried to rise up in me like a tide of ice water, but I clamped down on it hard. I left my glasses on, hoping they would conceal what was going on in my head. “We’re all going to die eventually,” I said evenly. “Can you give me an ETA on your demise in particular?”

  Caryl’s gaze lost focus, as though she were searching inside herself. Her breaths were labored and shallow, and her lips were turning blue.

  “Massive pulmonary embolism,” she said. “Blood oxygena­tion dropping rapidly—I’d say—minutes, not hours.”

  I jumped to my feet and began to climb the steps to the soundstage door. “Is Vivian powering this ward?” I asked Caryl without looking at her.

  “It seems to be . . . independent of her. But the curse—curses are always linked to essence.”

  “Is the curse still in the ward, or did you use it up when you touched the door?” I reached out.

  “I don’t know. Millie, don’t!”

  But I had already put my hand on the doorknob. I felt nothing, of course; one moment the soundstage was a seething mass of bruised magic making me want to look away—the next moment it was just a building, even through my glasses. I inhaled experimentally and found myself unhurt.

  “Well then,” I said. “We’re good to go.”

  I turned to Caryl. When I saw her still struggling for breath, part of me crawled into a corner and died.

  “Caryl,” I said flatly, “before you expire, could you be kind enough to dispense with the lock?”

  “Millie!” It was Gloria, her voice blurry with tears.

  Caryl sat gasping in the middle of the pavement, pulling off her gloves and wiping her bare hands on her knees with an intensity worthy of Lady Macbeth. No one knew what to do, since the person who usually gave orders was busy imploding. I moved to Caryl again and crouched nearby, leaving a bit of distance between us. I stared at the discarded gloves where they lay limp and bloody on the pavement. “Caryl, I need you to unlock that door.”

  Teo advanced as though he wanted to choke me, but then stopped short, flexing his hands. “Millie, for God’s sake, let’s just get out of here before somebody gets killed.”

  “I’d say we missed that boat, wouldn’t you?” I turned back to Caryl. “Are you sure the curse is lethal?”

  “This is how . . . she killed Martin,” Caryl gasped. His name fell from her lips like “Mommy” from a lost child’s, and for the first time I realized the depth of her love for him.

  I had to look away. It wasn’t the blood at the corners of her mouth that got me, or the corpselike tinge to her skin. It wasn’t even the grief for her mentor, or the fear that made her eyes look so young behind their dark liner. It was the trust mixed into it, the way she looked to me with irrational hope simply because I was the only person pretending to be calm.

  “Vivian could undo the curse,” I said.

  Caryl shook her head. “She would have to . . . be here.”

  “We can call her.”

  “No,” Tjuan interjected forcefully. “She’d kill all of us and have our bodies paved over.”

  “Also, she’d have to take the 405,” added Gloria with a ­sniffle. “It’s a parking lot this time of night.”

  Tjuan frowned. “Wouldn’t she just take La Cienega?”

  “Still, it’d be forty-five minutes at the very—”

  “Shut up!” I snapped. To my surprise, they did. I turned, forcing myself to make eye contact with Caryl. “What do you want to do with the time you have left?”

  She set her jaw, staring at the soundstage. “I’d like to . . . unlock that door,” she rasped.

  “That’s my girl.”

  She looked up at me. “I’m your girl?” She didn’t sound nineteen; she sounde
d nine.

  “Damn right.”

  Caryl started to get to her feet, one hand positioned as though to keep her heart from bursting out of her rib cage. I reached to help her, hesitated out of habit, then remembered that the damage had already been done and gave her my hand.

  Caryl gasped as she stood up straight. A deep gasp, a sweeping inhale of relief. It took me a moment to realize why.

  “I fixed you!” I said breathlessly, my fingers tightening convulsively on hers. Her hand was as soft as a baby’s.

  She shook her head and laughed, tears glistening on her lashes. “No,” she said. “It’s like the facades. You interrupted the circuit.”

  An incredulous snort escaped me. “So you can live a long, full life, so long as I never let go of your hand?”

  “Something like that.” She actually giggled, giddy as a cheerleader.

  “Well then, this will work out dandy until one of us has to pee,” I said, just to hear her laugh again. “Come on.” I tugged her toward the soundstage.

  Even with all things considered, Caryl managed to pull together enough focus to rot the wood around the door latch, allowing her to force it open with a well-placed shoulder. I immediately tore off my fey glasses; the golden radiance of Seelie magic that spilled from inside the soundstage was like staring directly into the sun.

  Something powerful took hold of us both, compelling us to cross the threshold and shut the door behind us. By the time I processed that it was yet another ward, it was too late to do anything about it. We both looked around, blinking, and then swore in unison.

  The pair of us stood holding hands in the middle of a broiling desert, white sun beating down on us at the apex of a faded sky. Behind and beside us was nothing but jagged horizon; ahead of us stood the remains of a classic Western ghost town, bleak and picturesque.

  “I know what this is,” I said. I tried putting on my glasses again and nearly burned out my retinas for my pains. I slid them on top of my head, since the dress Foxfeather had given me had no pockets. “Bottom dollar says David painted the walls in here; this is a location from Black Powder. I just have to touch the—”