Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  Tjuan got my message, and my prosthetic was subjected to its second round of abuse as he swung it with enthusiasm at the back of her head.

  It’s way harder to knock someone out than it looks in the movies, and that wasn’t what I wanted anyway. What I wanted was for her to fall forward, and she did, right through the doorway.

  I knew the pain was all in Vivian’s mind, but that didn’t make her screams any less chilling. Her eyes bulged; her whitened teeth stood out like marble as her lips drew back from them in anguish. She writhed, kicking at the floor, the heels of her hands thrust out, fingers curled into claws.

  A twisted part of me wanted to just stand there and drink it in, but I had to take my advantage. If I couldn’t kill her, I could at least take away her weapon.

  With only one knee to bear my weight, I needed both my hands. I had to let go of David and Caryl. I scrabbled toward Vivian like a three-legged dog, feeling my BK prosthetic loosen as I did it, but I didn’t care. I left my right foot behind me on the floor of the chapel as I lunged forward to grab Vivian’s throat.

  She was in too much agony to fight. I watched her glamour drop, revealing the horror underneath, some unholy hybrid of woman and mantis. Trails of red fluid seeped down her cheeks from the raw, sucking holes where her eyes should have been. Those holes were inches from my face; her teeth were like cactus spines in her too-wide mouth as she screamed. Given all that, I’ll admit I started screaming a little too. But I held on to her throat, because I was damned if she was going to cast another spell today.

  She started to shrivel, her white flesh visibly yellowing, creasing, sagging. That, I’ll admit, I found slightly dismaying.

  “What’s happening?” I said out loud. Tjuan just backed away onto the porch, grim and silent. When I looked over my shoulder at David, I saw him leaning over Caryl. At first my unhinged mind thought he was kissing her, but then he sat back and started doing chest compressions, and I realized that she’d died.

  “FUCK!” I said, bursting all at once into hysterical tears. And then I choked Vivian some more.

  Because I knew what was happening. Like me, Vivian had no identity of her own, nothing at the core of her but a black hole. For centuries she’d been animated only by the stolen essence of other fey, and I was drawing that out now.

  “You killed Caryl,” I said, squeezing harder. Somehow even on that alien face I could recognize her fear. She faced her death with all the grace of a rabbit in a snare, bug-eyed, thrashing. I watched her skin desiccate and drop from jagged gray bones. I watched that flesh turn to dust as it fell, watched her bones crumble, felt my fists close tighter and tighter until there was nothing left in them but grit.

  And then I just sat there crying, listening to the soft, desperate sounds of CPR behind me.

  Tjuan came in and tried to hand me my leg, but I didn’t move; I just stared at the pile of ruin that had been Vivian.

  “You should try to get on your feet,” he said. He glanced behind me, then out the door. “It’s just us now,” he said to the desert.

  “Teo . . . ?”

  Tjuan shook his head.

  “Tell me he’s going to be okay.”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  I fit my legs back into my prosthetics as best I could with shaking hands; Tjuan stood by, looking awkward and running his palms back over his hair. When I finished I reached up my hands, and he helped me get up off the floor. He let go as quick as he could; neither of us even tried for eye contact.

  The AK was hopelessly broken. Sensitive electronic instruments don’t take well to being used as weapons. The knee was stiff and unresponsive; I had to lurch out of the chapel and out into the square like a peg-legged pirate, past the well, to where Teo lay curled on his side in the road.

  Blood had soaked the dirt beneath him, spreading out like a fallen hero’s cloak. The boy had come damn near to cutting off his own hand with his pocketknife, driving the blade a surprising distance through bone before it had broken. The wound wasn’t bleeding anymore.

  I half sat, half fell onto the ground behind him, where there wasn’t as much blood. I didn’t reach to touch the body, didn’t do much of anything.

  “We were fighting,” I said to Tjuan. My voice sounded strange.

  “He knew you were sorry.”

  I just looked at the back of Teo’s head. An illusory fly landed on the edge of his ear, so I shooed it away. Even over the wet, meaty scent of blood, I could smell that gunk he put in his hair.

  “Asshole,” I said, and laid my hand on his arm. All those old scars. His skin was cooler than it would have been if the sun had really been shining on it.

  “Millie,” Tjuan said, and something in his tone made me look up.

  From the chapel, Caryl was making her way unsteadily toward us on Berenbaum’s arm.

  Joy did what pain couldn’t; my vision blurred, and tears spilled hot and fast onto my cheeks. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t, so I just reached my hands toward her. Berenbaum helped her over to us, and she knelt down next to me. She looked at Teo, her eyes vacant and scared.

  I pulled her to me and hugged her, not caring if she was okay with it. She stared at the body over my shoulder. I don’t know how long we clung to each other, me shaking with quiet sobs, her limp and still.

  “You killed her,” she finally rasped. “I told you not to do that.”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  She pulled back and looked at me. “They’ll never hire you back now,” she said. She reached up and laid her fingertips on the scar tissue at the side of my face. A maternal gesture, but her dark, colorless eyes were as lost as a child’s. “What will you do?”

  Berenbaum cleared his throat softly, and I turned to look at him.

  He didn’t meet my gaze, looking at Caryl instead. “I’ll talk to Inaya. She’s running HR for Valiant.”

  “There is no Valiant anymore,” I said. “No blood, no magic.”

  “Inaya’s got her own kind of magic.” David smiled faintly, but with none of his old sparkle; he was like a wax model of himself. “Always has. She wants a studio; no power in the world’s going to stop her. I’ll make sure she finds a place for you.”

  “You see?” I said to Caryl with forced cheerfulness. “I always land on my feet.”

  Caryl’s brow furrowed. She looked down at the stumps of my legs and then started to laugh, a wild cascade of husky ­giggles. Once she started she couldn’t stop; the laughter shook her like a seizure. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and looked at Tjuan; he was watching her too. He looked tired.

  “You all right?” I asked him tentatively.

  He turned his eyes to me but said nothing.

  “I need to find some rope,” said Caryl as she climbed to her feet, still giggling a little. “Or some cable. Something to lower down into the well.” Her words were fast and bright as she turned her back on the body. Berenbaum reached out an arm, and she leaned on it. They walked off together, leaving me with Tjuan and Teo. It’s hard to say who was warmer.

  Tjuan looked at me, and I looked at him.

  I hesitated. “Gloria was—”

  Tjuan’s eyes went hard, daring me.

  I chickened out. “I need to try to find the wall so I can get rid of this glamour. Can you help me up?”

  Tjuan’s eyes released me, drifting toward the well. He didn’t move.

  “She was brave,” I ventured. I waited for him to glare me into silence, but he didn’t. “She . . . always tried to do the right thing. She was . . .” I couldn’t think of anything else to add to her eulogy.

  Tjuan just kept staring at the well, and a muscle worked in his jaw.

  “I’m not religious,” I said, “but feel like I should go back to the chapel and say a prayer for her or something. Just . . . because.” I let out a weak laugh. “She probably prayed f
or me all the time.”

  Tjuan turned back to me then, not quite looking at me. Slowly he crouched down next to me, gazing off over my shoulder. “You are not wrong,” he said, and helped me back to my feet.

  • • •

  The ride back to Residence Four was about what you’d expect from a van with six traumatized fey piled in the back of it. One of them was apparently a banshee, based solely on the sounds she made the whole ride back. I would have tried to comfort her, only I’m pretty sure it was me she was screaming about. Once we arrived at the Residence, Caryl, Tjuan, and I did our best to put all the worms back in their can.

  Tjuan took charge of arranging the fey’s transport back to Arcadia while Caryl took Inaya aside for a private talk. My job—my last job—was to interview Claybriar and his sister. Back at the soundstage, David was busily creating cover stories for the deaths and arranging for proper burials. Except for Vivian. I think his plans for her involved a Dustbuster.

  Claybriar’s sister was called Trillhazel. The entire time I interviewed her, he didn’t take his arm from around her or his eyes off her face. They sat on one of the sofas in the living room; I sat on the one facing them with Monty on my lap. The cat was clingy, as though he knew this was good-bye.

  Trillhazel was lovely in a long-faced, feral way; she had deli­cate horns and was as bare-chested as her brother.

  “I don’t understand,” I said to her. “If Vivian was trying to help the commoners, why did she have six of you imprisoned in a well?”

  “Viscount, he—explain.” Her English wasn’t great. “He say—bad for good? Few hurt. Many better.”

  “You mean you were a sacrifice? You went willingly?”

  Claybriar exchanged a few words with his sister in a musical language that made me feel as though I were lying in ­summer grass, watching clouds.

  “Yes,” Claybriar said then in English, still looking at his sister. The anger was back in his eyes, and this time the wounded edges of it were directed at her. “A sacrifice.”

  I shook my head slowly, running my fingers down Monty’s spine. “Yet Vivian and the viscount managed to keep themselves out of that well, I notice.”

  Claybriar let out a short, mirthless laugh. “Nobles can’t just vanish. But Her Majesty wouldn’t have noticed a few missing commoners if one of them hadn’t been my sister.”

  “How was harvesting blood even supposed to help the commoners?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  Trillhazel looked at me with haunted dark eyes; they were so like her brother’s I felt a moment of vertigo. “I—before did not know,” she said. “Please believe. Did not know.”

  “Know what?”

  “She—want our blood for—use here. Destroy in Arcadia—land home. Home land?”

  Claybriar clarified with her briefly in their native tongue. “Estate,” he said, presumably to me, though he didn’t meet my eyes. Then he said to her in confusion, “But her estate was already destroyed.”

  “No,” said Trillhazel quietly, shaking her head. “Not her estate. Other noble. All, every one. Leave only the commons.” Claybriar sat back like she’d slapped him in the face. Given that noble fey were more or less the entirety of the Project’s clientele, I had a sudden certainty that Caryl was not going to be fired.

  “It’s all right now,” I told them both. “Vivian is dead. She’s not going to hurt anyone else.”

  Trillhazel looked at me as though she didn’t quite believe me, and Claybriar leaned over to kiss her temple. My chest hurt, watching them, and I hugged Monty close.

  “Go with the others,” he said slowly to her in English. “Go get ready; we’re going home.”

  She smiled up at him, then rose from the couch and headed for the stairs. Her hooves struck crisp, loud sounds from the wooden steps; I watched her, then turned back to Claybriar. His gaze was on me now, and I wished it wasn’t; my skin crawled with bashful dread.

  “You don’t feel it,” he said. His eyes reminded me of the well I’d found him in.

  I shook my head miserably. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I . . . care about you, and I think you’re . . . amazing. God, that drawing, I can’t tell you what it meant. But when we met, it wasn’t—it wasn’t like the thing I saw with Inaya and Foxfeather.”

  He nodded slowly, then dropped his head and stared at his hands. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “I looked for you, for years. Felt you go west, and followed you. I was so close. But I didn’t get to you in time. If I had—”

  “No,” I interrupted fiercely, staring in dismay at the top of his horned head. “No, it’s not your fault. And—I was supposed to end up this way. You’d still be in that well if I weren’t.”

  He looked up at that, and although he didn’t make a move toward me, there was so much love in his eyes I didn’t know what to do with it all.

  “Why did you leave those drawings everywhere?” I asked instead.

  “I’ve been doing it all this time,” he said. “Like messages in a bottle. Everytime I’m stuck on this side waiting for anything, I make a sketch and leave it behind. I had to believe you’d find one eventually. And in the end fate puts you a few steps behind me, hunting the same guy.”

  I smiled sadly. All those drawings I’d never found, little slices of Claybriar I’d never see.

  I thought of Officer Clay, with his gray T-shirt and his caffè mocha. He didn’t scare me. I pictured sitting astride his lap, his hand curled around the scarred end of my thigh, his mouth soft against mine. But of course it couldn’t be like that. He couldn’t even touch me.

  “I should go,” he said, standing.

  “Don’t give up on me,” I blurted.

  He looked at me, startled, one ear twitching back. “Of course not,” he said.

  “You’ll come back sometime?”

  “Of course.” He lingered a moment, then turned without saying good-bye. I averted my eyes from his hooves as he walked away.

  I felt a twinge of guilt for judging his appearance—who was I to be choosy about legs—and it was that guilt that made me realize with a shock what had just happened.

  When I’d imagined us together, he was the only one I’d changed. For the first time since my fall, I had imagined something beautiful happening with me in it. The real me, missing pieces and all.

  • • •

  Rivenholt was executed in Arcadia with great ceremony, according to an e-mail from David Berenbaum. When I tried to reply, my e-mail bounced back to me—no such account. The next day the trades reported that David had packed it off to some emu ranch in New Mexico with Linda, leaving Inaya West as the sole proprietor of Valiant Studios. As David had promised, she offered me a job as her assistant, and I accepted it.

  Since Teo didn’t legally exist, and Vivian was being treated as a missing person, only Gloria got an obituary. Gloria Day, freelance script supervisor and missionary to the needy, killed in a tragic accident, service to be held at St. Brendan Church. It wasn’t until I heard the Latin hymns at her funeral that I realized why I’d never been able to find anything about her online. Gloria dei was more than likely not the name on her birth certificate.

  I wheeled myself out of the service a little early—I still hadn’t replaced my broken AK—and found Caryl lurking outside, leaning against the church.

  “Well, hello,” I said. “You’re still basically human, you know. You can probably enter holy ground.”

  “Funerals make me uncomfortable,” she replied evenly.

  “Tjuan and Phil are up front; I don’t think they saw me. But I’m sure they’d like to sit with you.”

  “I am only here because I didn’t know where else to find you.”

  “I’ve got an apartment in the Marina; you can have the number if you want. I’m going to be Inaya’s assistant at Valiant. How about you? Still have a job?”

  Caryl was silent for
a moment, then pushed off the wall and moved in front of my chair so I had to look at her. For some reason she’d cut off all her hair; it lay close to her head in well-groomed curls.

  “National has put me on probation,” she said. “Which means I still have the authority to hire you back, if you wish. Tjuan needs a new partner.”

  “Having employee turnover problems?”

  “Millie.” Her tone was flat, but I knew a rebuke when I heard one.

  I sighed and ruffled my hair. “I can’t imagine anything less fun than having Tjuan as a partner. And I have a roof now, and a job.”

  “But you’re alone.”

  “I’m thinking of getting a cat. Seriously, I want to try living a normal life. If I come back, I want it to be because I chose it.”

  Caryl regarded me for a moment. “If you choose the Arcadia Project,” she said, “you will be the first.”

  “Well, I’m pretty special.”

  “Yes, you are.” There was no emotion behind the words; she must have had Elliott out. Still, it shut me up for a second.

  “You know what they say,” I said briskly then over the urge to cry. “If you love something, set it free.”

  Her mouth curved up in a bland little smile, and she reached out, giving my hand a single squeeze with her black silk glove before letting it go. “Good-bye,” she said. “I’ll contact you if we hear from Claybriar.”

  I watched her walk away down the sidewalk, and a little voice told me I wasn’t going to be anybody’s secretary for very long. Once you’ve seen the world through fey glasses, for better or for worse it never quite looks the same again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Because this book was begun with no expectation of success, it had a long, fragmented path to completion. Without a doubt, I’ve forgotten some of the people who made it possible.

  A dedication isn’t enough to acknowledge the contribution of Paul Briggs, who single-handedly led me through the first draft by dangling the carrot of positive feedback, two thousand words at a time. The world is dimmer for his unexpected loss, seven months after holding in his hands the book he helped to create.