Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  A sound behind me, like approaching thunder, made me turn. Caryl crowded me, hanging on my arm, as we spotted a posse of a dozen men on horseback riding straight toward us. Black-and-white Appaloosas, skewbald pintos, bay mustangs, all gleaming with sweat under the desert sun and kicking up great clouds of dust as their riders spurred them into a frenzy.

  “They’re not real,” I said, backing up slowly. “I’m eighty percent sure they’re just painted on the wall behind us.” But I was already adjusting the valve on my hydraulic knee.

  “Millie . . . ,” Caryl said, tugging my hand as the posse continued toward us. They clearly intended to ride us down. “Even if it’s psychic spellwork,” she said, “it will still feel like being trampled.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “Keep hold of my hand, don’t pull ahead, and don’t talk to me. Running is hard, so don’t distract me.”

  “Millie . . .” A panicked note crept into her voice as we began to feel the ground tremble under us. One of the riders reached behind him to free the rifle that was slung across his back.

  We took off, and I threw all my focus into movement. I hadn’t gotten the valve setting quite right. The knee didn’t bend fast enough, forcing me to sweep the leg around in an arc with each panicked stride. I focused my fear into the desperate energy it took to keep myself upright. With clumsy control I managed to gather some acceleration, but Caryl was trying to run faster still, starting to drag me forward in a way that promised to topple us both. I could actually smell the horses behind us now.

  Caryl looked over her shoulder, which slowed us abruptly. I couldn’t yell at her to keep steady; even taking the trouble to find words would have broken my rhythm. I just kept blindly flailing forward. Caryl was an idiot without her construct; when she saw how close the horses were, she tried to pull me along faster, as though she could help, as though she could give me back my body whole. I cursed fluently as my steps stuttered.

  At last Caryl seemed to see the problem, and she tried to release my hand. But then she’d be dead for real, so I crushed her hand in my grip, refusing to let it slip away. The effort broke my rhythm, and I stumbled.

  We both fell to the hard, hot ground in a tangle of bones and titanium, and the posse rode us down.

  I heard Caryl screaming in my ear, smelled blood. I felt my bones snap, the hot, bright pain of muscle tearing like raw chicken. I entered a slow-motion adrenaline dream, flashed back to falling, catching in a tree, things tearing and snapping and piercing, not knowing what was wood and what was bone. I thought I’d forgotten the fall, but there it was, fresh as new bread, and I was screaming, and my heart beat so hard it made a sound like a chair scraping over tile; I could feel it almost exploding in my chest.

  Then the riders were gone, and I was alive.

  I could feel my broken and bleeding body, but I looked down and saw that I was fine, except that my thigh had been jarred loose from the socket of my AK. Once I saw that I wasn’t hurt, the pain faded. Caryl was curled in the fetal position on the ground next to me, gasping; her hand had slipped away during the fall. I reached over quickly to recapture it.

  “Caryl,” I said. “You’re okay. Look at yourself. You’re not hurt.”

  Her breathing slowed and she carefully sat up, wiping blood from her mouth and then feeling her own limbs experimentally. Dazed, she sat patiently and kept a hand on my arm while I forced my thigh back into the suction suspension. Without my powder, I couldn’t get a comfortable fit. I settled for “not going to fall off in the immediate future,” readjusted the hydraulic valve for walking, and then let Caryl help me to my feet.

  “Shit,” I said. “I have no idea where the wall is now, much less the door.”

  “I imagine that’s the point of the horses,” said Caryl. I still couldn’t get over the unsteadiness in her voice, the expressive way her syllables rode the currents of her emotion.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked her.

  “Perfectly fine,” she said, squeezing my hand.

  “Well, I don’t see a Gate standing around, do you? So if it’s in here, it must be in one of those buildings.” I pointed to the little town.

  “Do you hear something?”

  I did hear it. The white noise of ragged breathing and feet pounding on sand. We both turned to see Teo sprinting toward us, followed by a wild-eyed Tjuan, who had thrown Gloria over his shoulder. They were being chased by nothing we could see, other than their own dust clouds.

  “Oh hey, guys,” I said dryly as they barreled toward us, too panicked even to question our calm. “Those riders aren’t”—they sprinted right by us—“real.”

  They managed to make it all the way to town and dive for cover on the porch of a dilapidated hat shop. Caryl and I eventually caught up to them, watching them recover their breath and turn their heads in unison to watch the nonexistent posse gallop by. Gloria winced and coughed as though the horses’ hooves had kicked up dust in her face.

  “John Riven, you are a genius,” I muttered aloud. “An evil genius I am going to personally throttle to death if I ever have the good fortune of meeting you.”

  The ghost town looked just as it had in the stills from Berenbaum’s postproduction office: at the far end was the clichéd town square complete with an old stone well, a plethora of hitching posts, and a chapel with a decaying bell tower. Stretching toward us from it was a single dusty lane two carriages wide, with saloons and feed stores and mining supply depots and other shops whose signs were too cracked and faded to read.

  “Everyone okay?” I asked my comrades as we approached the porch.

  “I think my heart actually stopped for a minute,” said Gloria, fanning herself with one hand. “My mouth tastes like an old penny.”

  “I fucked up my ankle,” said Teo. “Didn’t feel it till now, but shit.”

  “I broke a nail,” Tjuan deadpanned.

  “Okay,” I said. “I think our best plan is for the three of you to search the buildings for the Gate while Caryl and I try to find a wall so we can dispel this ward and see what this place really looks like and where the doors are.”

  “What do we do if we find the Gate?” asked Gloria.

  “Just shout,” I said. “This place is big, but not as big as it looks, so we should be able to hear you just fine from wherever. Caryl will know what to do once we find the Gate.”

  Everyone looked to Caryl. She fidgeted, her hand tightening in mine. “Do as Millie says,” she said, trying for her usual crisp tone and almost managing it. “I am placing her in charge until National arrives next week.”

  “Wha—” I spluttered, almost dropping her hand.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Gloria quickly, the way you do when your boss has gone crazy. “Come on, boys, let’s split up and search the place. And for love of the Lord, Teo, let someone else search the saloon; I don’t want you getting distracted by some magicked-up lady of the evening.” Her voice was too bright, too brassy, as she led them away.

  I was still staring at Caryl, because with all this nonsense about putting me in charge, it had finally sunk in that she had every intention of dying.

  46

  The sounds of bickering faded as Caryl and I headed down the lane toward the town square, hand in hand. I shifted my fingers to interlace them with hers. “I kind of like hanging out with the real you,” I said.

  “This isn’t the real me,” she argued, as she had in the car after leaving Regazo de Lujo. Only this time with 90 percent more petulance.

  “Now that you can’t shut me up by saying I’ll explode Elliott, I just want to say—I feel really bad for everything I put you through. You’re a really good boss, and I enjoyed working for you, and I never meant to disrespect you in any way.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but watching her completely fold in on herself and dissolve into tears wasn’t it.

  “Hey,” I said, stopping
in the town square, under the shadow of the ruined bell tower. “It’s okay, shhh, it’s okay.” Which was bullshit, of course; I couldn’t even find okay on the map. I tried to give Caryl a hug, but she cringed away, then immediately apologized.

  “I panic if anything closes in on me,” she said. “They used to put me in a box when I screamed too loudly.”

  “The Unseelie?”

  “Let’s just find a way out of here.”

  I squinted up at the sky, trying to find a seam, a difference in shading, something. But it went on and on smoothly for miles, the color of bleached denim. “Was it Vivian who kidnapped you?”

  “Let’s not talk about it, please.” There was such urgency in her voice that I reluctantly let it drop.

  “All right, well, can we talk about why you put me in charge just now?” I said.

  “Because I like you.”

  “I beg your fucking pardon?”

  She made a spastic waving-away gesture with her free hand. “It doesn’t matter. National will put someone else in charge when they get here next week. It was just . . . a gesture.”

  “Do you think it was a mistake to fire me?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think straight without Elliott.” She tried to lead us out of the town square, but I pulled her up short.

  “Yes, you can, Caryl; you just have no practice at it. It’s not either/or. This is a thing they taught me. Emotion Mind and Reason Mind. They can work together. You don’t have to get rid of your feelings, you just have to keep them out of the ­driver’s seat. I’m not saying it’s easy.”

  She gave a nervous, keening little laugh. “Very well then, I’ll devote my remaining five minutes of life to the study.”

  “Apparently your sarcasm is intact. I find that weirdly reassuring.”

  She avoided my gaze. “If you find a way out of here, if you find out what Vivian is planning, National might let you stay.”

  “And if not, they’ll want to kill me or something, right? Or wipe my memory?”

  Caryl looked at me, aghast. “What makes you think that?”

  “Otherwise what’s to stop me from spilling your secrets and causing mass hysteria?”

  She shrank a little and said nothing.

  I suppose I should have put it together earlier. That’s the problem with having a huge ego; you always assume that when you’re chosen for something, it’s because you’re special, ­talented, better.

  “That’s why you hire from the loony bin,” I said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with sensitivity or creativity or anything like that. It’s plausible deniability.”

  Caryl scuffed her toe on the dusty ground.

  “And just mental illness isn’t enough,” I persisted. “They have to be the kind of people who would have a roomful of empty seats at their funeral. The kind of people with no one to vouch for them.”

  She looked up at me, eyes narrowed slightly. “I’ll confess that’s part of it. But if that were all, I could just scoop anyone off the street. Not all marginalized people are actually useful to us. Teo is dependable, lawful, and inventive. Tjuan is focused and clever. Gloria could get information from a gargoyle.”

  “And me?”

  “You—” she said, looking away. “You, I liked.”

  I cleared my throat, laughed a little. “You keep saying that. But I kind of felt like I made a bad impression when we met.”

  “By then I had already made up my mind. When you made the news last year, I researched you. I saw your films.”

  “You’re . . . a fan?” I barked a laugh. “Hey, guess what, you can run unopposed for president of the club.”

  “Don’t make it sound like that,” she said irritably, making as if to pull her hand away. I held on. “I saw The Stone Guest,” she said. “It said things about growing up all wrong and too fast, things I didn’t know how to say, or even really how to feel. You seemed . . . insightful. Complicated. Passionate.”

  “Holy shit. You have a crush on me.”

  This time she did manage to yank her hand away, but I caught it again. “I’m finished talking about this,” she said, doing a damn good impression of her normal icy self.

  “Caryl—”

  “I want to find that Gate,” she said. “Not only to save the prisoners, but because I want to know how Vivian did it. You have no way of appreciating how impossible it is to arrest something between worlds.”

  “Like falling halfway down a hole . . . but sideways!” I mimicked Foxfeather’s lilting cadence, her little torso tilt.

  “Just so,” Caryl said dryly, and then stopped. Her grip nearly broke my fingers, and she stared at me with her mouth hanging open. No, not at me. Behind me.

  I turned and found myself staring at the picturesque old well. As I followed her train of thought, my mouth fell open too.

  “This is why you stopped here,” Caryl said. “You led us right to him.”

  We approached the well and leaned over, looking down into its depths. It was darker inside than it should have been with the sun so high in the imaginary sky, as though here alone the glamour didn’t penetrate. The bottom wasn’t visible, but I could faintly see what hung at the end of the rope. Not a bucket, but a flat wooden platform, just big enough for someone to sit on. I tried to turn the crank, but between having only one arm to use and no good legs to stand on, I didn’t get far.

  “You’re not thinking of going down there, are you?” Caryl said, squeezing my hand.

  “Are you bonkers?”

  Caryl moved to the edge, peering down. “Is anyone down there?” she called. Her rough voice reverberated against the smooth round walls of the shaft.

  The staggered assortment of hoarse whimpers and moans that rose up to answer her made the fine hairs rise on the back of my neck.

  “Millie?” came a faint voice then. I knew that voice.

  “Clay,” I said. “You bastard. Just hold on, okay? We’re going to get you out of there. And then I’m going to kick your ass.”

  There was a long silence, and then he just said, faintly, “Okay.”

  “They’ve literally just turned it sideways,” said Caryl, her voice soft with horror. “A tunnel they can’t climb out of, and they’re forced into continuous contact with it. If they were human, they’d have gone mad within a few hours.”

  “Fey can’t go mad?”

  “Fey are mad already.”

  “WE FOUND IT!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “EVERYBODY GET YOUR ASSES OVER HERE!”

  Caryl winced. “Is that how you address your film crews?”

  “Whatever works,” I said. As if on cue, all three of them came sprinting for the square, Gloria lagging behind.

  “Where is it?” Teo asked, skidding to a dusty stop in front of me. Tjuan was close behind.

  “They’re at the bottom of the well,” I said. “Vivian and company built a Gate sideways, so there’s no way out. They’re awake down there.”

  They all peered down, as Caryl and I had done, listening to the pitiful moans from below.

  Gloria started taking her shoes off. “Someone lower me down,” she said.

  “Oh hell no,” said Teo.

  “I’ll have to bring ’em up one by one,” she said, already straddling the lip of the well. “If they’re awake, all I have to do is help ’em onto the platform. Tjuan?”

  Tjuan glanced skyward, then moved to assist.

  “Gloria,” I said numbly. “Wow.”

  “Not doin’ it to impress you, sugar.”

  The platform swayed sickeningly as Tjuan helped her ­settle onto it, and she let out one little “Whoa,” before locking the rope between her thighs and giving Caryl a salute. “Let ’er down,” she said with a cheery grin.

  Tjuan reached for the crank.

  “Wait!” said Gloria. “Teo, can I have your ligh
ter? It’s awful dark down there.”

  Teo hesitated, the bastard, but finally had the decency to hand it over. Tjuan set his teeth and began to turn the crank; it says something about me that even under the circumstances I noticed the flexing of his muscles.

  “Everything all right?” called down Caryl after a moment.

  “Yeah,” answered Gloria in a thin voice. “I can see them. Yours first, Millie?”

  “Please.” There was really no fair way to choose, so I might as well not pretend to be impartial.

  No sooner had I spoken than Gloria let out an earsplitting horror-movie scream. The three of us not occupied in holding the crank flew to the edge of the well and peered down. There was not a hint of light; either Gloria had switched off the lighter or she had disappeared into a darkness that was impenetrable by ordinary means.

  The screams didn’t stop. Tjuan started to reverse direction, clenching his jaw, but then Claybriar called out hoarsely from below, just loud enough to be heard over Gloria’s screams.

  “Wait!” he said. Then after a moment, “Down!”

  Tjuan glanced at me—oh right, I was supposed to be in charge. I nodded, a downward stab of my finger the best I could do at communication. Tjuan lowered the platform some more, and after a moment the screams faded to sobbing gasps. I heard Claybriar murmuring quietly, a soothing cadence, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  “Get us out of here,” Gloria called up with surprising firmness.

  Tjuan wasted no time, arms and back straining as he turned the crank, lifting them both up into the light. Gloria and Claybriar were clinging to each other, she straddling his lap in a way she would most likely have found unseemly under other circumstances. To make matters even more awkward, enough of Claybriar’s essence had drained out of him that his facade was history, and I was looking at six and a half feet of faun.

  Foxfeather’s rendition of him hadn’t been half-bad, actually, other than the vapid expression. He had crescent-shaped horns and powerful shaggy legs that bent the wrong way. His bare torso was well worth staring at, and his face looked almost like a caricature of the human version. But it was his eyes that took me aback when they locked onto mine. They were exactly the same. Why this made my scalp crawl, I don’t know.