Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  “You want something from me,” Shock said to Caryl’s chest.

  “I just want to understand a bit more about how facades work,” she said. “Possibly debunk some old myths.”

  “I . . . suppose I might be able to help. Depending on the question.” He reluctantly reached for the sugar bowl, started dumping cubes into his cup.

  Caryl waited for him to raise the cup to his lips, then said, “If a facade crafter had a sample of someone’s blood, could he make a facade that looked identical to the donor?”

  Shock choked slightly and set the cup down.

  “Shock,” I said firmly. “What is it?”

  He looked at me. At Alondra, at Caryl. Caryl smiled encouragingly.

  “That is the only way to make a facade,” he said gravely.

  10

  “What?” That had not been the revelation I’d been expecting. “No, wait. No. Claybriar’s facade; that’s not anybody.”

  “No one living,” said Shock. “They likely pulled from old stores.”

  Alondra let out a cute gasp of astonishment. “Old . . . stores?” she said. “How long do they . . . I mean . . . in a hundred years, is some fey going to be walking around wearing my face?”

  “Probably, yes. You did give permission when you signed the contract.”

  I tried to think back. There had been something in there about using my image, but it hadn’t seemed all that weird, and the thing had been over forty pages long, so I might have been skimming to get to the weird stuff.

  “Are you suggesting,” said Caryl skeptically, “that somewhere in London they have been storing huge amounts of blood for decades if not centuries, and this has never been a problem?”

  “Not in London,” said Shock. “At the White Rose.”

  “What’s that again?” I said.

  “The Seelie palace,” Alondra said to me. Yes, yes, she’d been here longer than me, knew more than me, was prettier than me—I got it, I got it.

  “That would make sense, actually,” said Caryl. “Very secure.”

  “Unseelie have to get blood there too?” I asked Shock. “You have to go to the Seelie palace any time you need to make a facade?”

  “Yes,” said Shock. “This does not please my father, and it is one reason not many Unseelie fey attempt to travel here.”

  “But if they stored blood at Nullhorne,” mused Caryl, “it would not be as accessible to humans. The Gates in Saint Petersburg were destroyed.”

  I felt as though little sparks were dancing around the inside of my skull, trying to find something to burn, to flare into ideas.

  “Help me understand this,” I said to Shock. “You went to the White Rose to get blood to make your own facade? And your father’s?”

  “I used the same vial for both,” he said. “I just made a younger version for myself. But yes.”

  “How much blood does it take?” I asked.

  “It depends on skill. I can make half a dozen facades from one vial.”

  “Do you ever use the blood for anything else?”

  He hesitated. “Besides making facades? No, I don’t. That is forbidden.”

  “I’ve heard they use blood to track people.”

  “Human wizards do that. Fey are not permitted to use the blood stores for anything other than facades.”

  “Because human blood is a sort of intoxicant for fey,” said Caryl. “A controlled substance.”

  “Something like that.” Shock was getting fidgety again. “Look, I really should get back. I live inside a perimeter, and I used Gates to get here, so the Project can’t track me, but if someone there checks the census ward, they might notice someone missing.”

  “We’ll let you go soon,” I said, “I just have a couple more questions.”

  “How many is a couple? If you really mean two, I will answer them. And then I must go.”

  So fey of him. He’d hate it if I pointed that out. “Two then.” I carefully sorted out the dozens bouncing around in my skull. “Could blood be used to track the facade that was made with it?”

  “Yes,” he said, shifting his weight. “That is how they find rogue fey.”

  “Can blood be used for anything else? Besides making facades and tracking people? And settling down flighty fey who don’t have Echoes?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “A human’s blood could be used to compel her to do anything. But only for so long as the blood lasts. That’s why they are only allowed to store a tiny vial from each person, in case the stores were to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “In case,” I said wryly.

  Shock lowered his eyes. “She doesn’t want to do anything bad to you. If you just . . . if you just cooperate with her . . .”

  “Shock,” said Caryl very slowly. “She already had me abducted as a child so that your father could drink my blood.”

  He shook his head in denial.

  “And,” Caryl continued, “we believe she has already framed my senior agent Tjuan for assault with a deadly weapon.”

  He looked up at her in startled horror. “That— No, that cannot be true. No.”

  Clearly news to him. Interesting.

  “You seem like a very smart man,” Caryl said. “I want you to do some research and think very hard about why we might have taken such a drastic step as to rebel against such a powerful person.”

  Shock rose from the couch, flustered, almost angry. “I am smart,” he said. “There’s more to—it is very complicated. I know it is easy for you to sit and think me some witless pawn, but I am not a child. I can see when someone is—” He clenched his fists. “I have to go,” he said, and headed for the stairs. “I will make a new facade for Brand, because what happened to him was my mistake. But once that is finished, I should not speak with you again.”

  Caryl made no move to stop him. “I wish you well,” she said gently, and his stride halted ever so slightly before he bolted up the stairs two at a time.

  Alondra fidgeted. “Should I . . . ?”

  “Let him go,” Caryl said with a slight smile. “He will be back.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” I said, unsettled.

  “You have your skills, Millie. I have mine.”

  “My thing is ideas,” I said, “and I’m working on one. But we’ll need him. Are you sure?”

  “I am certain. May I guess your idea?”

  “Have at it.”

  She relaxed against the cushions, draping her arms along the back of the sofa. The look she gave me was frankly seductive, and I felt my pulse accelerate. Alondra looked between us like she wanted popcorn.

  “You hope,” Caryl said confidently, “to entice Shock to access the White Rose storage and steal Tjuan’s blood sample.”

  “Ha,” I said. “So close.”

  “Do enlighten me, then.”

  “I hope to entice him to steal them all. But first, I’m going to need to run a little errand.”

  • • •

  I found an old key and a box cutter, and called Alvin to drive me to the storage place. I needed someone who wasn’t too close to me, but also wasn’t a dick. My unit was at the back of the complex, sealed by a putty-colored garage door. I took a deep, steadying breath as I unlocked it.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s in there?” said Alvin. His tawny-brown eyes seemed sympathetic, but I couldn’t tell if he was for real.

  “Everything,” I said. “All the stuff that was in my dorm suite when I jumped. My roommate set it up for me when I was in the hospital, even paid the bill for several months until it was obvious my dad’s inheritance would cover it.”

  “Nice roommate.”

  “I guess,” I said. I hadn’t thought of her in a long time. Pale, homely face, jet-black ringlets. She’d always written cute messages for me on the whiteboard. I’d thought I could confide in her what had happened with Professor Scott. I’d been wrong.

  “This must be hard,” said Alvin.

  Tears threatened; I blinked them back. “I kne
w you’d get it. That’s why I asked you.”

  “That means a lot,” he said. Soft, surprised. “I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but I’m honored.”

  “You’re going to have to stop with all that unless you want me to fall apart before I even get the door open.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “Can you—will you open it?”

  He bent and lifted the door; it rattled and clacked its way up into the recesses of the frame. Inside were dusty stacks of boxes, none labeled.

  “This is going to take a week,” I said.

  “Can I help? Open some things?”

  “Ehh . . . God only knows what all was in that room. Contraband? Sex toys?”

  “Gotcha,” said Alvin, fanning out his hands and backing up a step.

  Without much hope, I approached one of the boxes and slit it open. Inside were clothes, packed neatly but strangely: Jeans rolled into tubes, shirts folded asymmetrically. Lacy bras, thigh-high stockings.

  My face went hot. I’d worn the stockings to class. A hole in one knee with a trailing nylon scar to either side. I’d had knees then, smooth and tanned. That hole, he’d told me later, drove him crazy.

  I rested my forehead on one of the boxes.

  “You all right?” Alvin said from outside.

  “Fine.” I lifted my head.

  I tried another box: all dishes except, strangely, a couple of copies of entertainment industry directories. Their proximity sparked my memory, and I felt a surge of hope.

  “They’re packed by where they were in the suite,” I said. “So if I can find something that was near what I’m looking for . . .”

  Slash, slash, slash. Eight more boxes, none of them what I needed.

  Slash. Something caught my eye: a brass-colored braid.

  “Oh my God.” This time I did start crying.

  “Millie, what is it?”

  I held up the fragile artifact, tied with a dark blue bow on one end, a red rubber band on the other. “My hair,” I said. “From when I was eight.”

  “Wow,” said Alvin.

  “It’s—my dad kept telling me to cut my hair; I’d cry so hard when my nannies brushed it. They complained. He told me I’d look good with short hair. I didn’t even like having long hair, but I dug in my heels so hard for some reason. It was the first, maybe the worst fight we ever got in. The things he said, I—”

  I put it down, put my hands over my face. Alvin came into the space; I felt his palm against my arm. I leaned into him, let him hug me.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I finally said, pulling away.

  “You can finish the story,” Alvin said. “If you want.”

  I shook my head. “He’s dead,” I said, slashing another box. “He killed himself too.”

  “Millie,” said Alvin, so sternly I stopped to look at him.

  “You said ‘too.’ You didn’t kill yourself. You’re still here.”

  “Right,” I said, and looked away. “Sorry.”

  Three more boxes—slash, slash, slash—before I found the one I was looking for. Bottom drawer of the desk I’d sat at so many times, editing video footage, finishing papers late into the night. After I’d lifted out enough contents to make it light enough, I turned it upside down on the storage room floor.

  There it was, a little flash of dark blue in the waterfall of worthless paper. I nabbed it and held it up.

  “Your passport?” said Alvin with a little laugh. “I was expecting something, I don’t know, a little more epic.”

  “This is epic,” I said, flipping to the ID page to double-check. “Still valid. This means Caryl and I can fly to London and get the Medial Vessel!”

  “Wait, what?” Alvin looked like I’d flicked him between the eyes.

  “Caryl is great at breaking and entering; I’ve done it with her like three times. If we take that Bag of Holding thingie, not only do they have to come to us if they want to do Gate stuff, but if Caryl’s right about getting Shock on our team, he can take the bag to wherever they store all the blood vials and just clean them the hell out!”

  The expression on his face was sheer terror. “Millie, no, no, no. That’s insane.”

  “Hear me out. Their threats are all about resources. They have this, they have that, we have nothing. So just . . . take the damn resources! She’s already made this into a war. If we hold the resources, we hold the power, and we can use it for good. For peace. No threats, just forcing people to fucking behave themselves.”

  He spluttered, clenched his fists. “Are you even—? You can’t just . . . fucking walk into Mordor! You’d set off a thousand alarms the moment you left the L.A. perimeter!”

  I frowned. “There has to be some way of disabling that. For every security system, there’s someone who knows how to get around it.”

  “No,” said Alvin. “Just . . . no. This is the opposite of the way we should be thinking right now.”

  “This doesn’t encourage me to be honest with you about my ideas, Alvin.”

  He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. Exhaled. “Look, I’m not trying to—can you put aside your authority issues for five seconds and look at this? This is serious.”

  “Yes! It is! My partner is hiding from the cops! How much more serious does it need to get before we fight back?”

  He started to pace. “Millie, please, don’t. You’re being more of a liability than a help right now. We should be thinking about trying to find some way to reconcile, at least enough for her to—”

  “Fuck surrender. That’s exactly what that bitch is hoping for.”

  Alvin stopped short, stood very still. I winced, thinking I’d crossed a line. But when he turned back to me, a little smile was playing around his lips.

  “What?” I said suspiciously.

  “Maybe that’s it,” he said. “The sane thing would be to surrender, wouldn’t it? So maybe we don’t try to sneak into London. We throw up our hands, beg mercy, beg for a meeting with her.”

  “We Trojan-horse it?” I put a hand on my hip, looking sidelong at him. “Excuse me, Mr. Lawful, but did you and I just start planning a heist?”

  His expression was wondering, dazed almost. “I think . . . I think maybe we did.”

  “Well, fuck,” I said. “If you and I both manage to agree on a plan, it’s going to be tighter than a preacher’s ass.”

  “But you have to promise to trust me,” Alvin said. “We make a plan, we stick to it—not one surprise from you. I do not like your surprises, Millie.”

  I put out my hand, and he clasped it solidly. “You can count on me,” I said.

  11

  Going through international airport security with two prosthetic legs and a steel plate in your head isn’t exactly a piece of cake, but it’s easier than going through with a turban. All I had to do Friday evening to get past TSA was announce where all my metal was and let them run the wand over me. The worst part of the trip, actually, was sitting in the center seat in economy class on a ten-hour flight. Caryl’s claustrophobia meant she had to take the aisle seat, and there was no way I was going to demand the window seat from Alvin when we were actually getting along.

  Alvin had gotten us all one-way tickets, since he wasn’t entirely sure how long our business would take. It amused me to ponder what the cops might think if they happened to notice the three of us leaving the country with no obvious plans to return.

  Actually, we were smuggling fourth and fifth passengers; Elliott and Caveat didn’t require tickets. They proved themselves very useful: Elliott kept Caryl calm, while Caveat enveloped us in a subtle auditory bubble that kept the rows ahead and behind from eavesdropping on our conversation.

  Over the winter we’d discovered that when spirits were allowed to cast their own spells, they were much, much better at it than humans and sidhe were at giving them orders. This, in fact, had been the key to Vivian’s seeming brilliance: letting a spirit create its own spellwork opened magic to new levels of fluency and subtlet
y. It was the difference between ordering someone to dance, body part by body part, versus letting a person follow the music.

  It was only after the plane had been at cruising altitude for nearly an hour that the whirlwind of the last forty-eight hours of planning started to sink slowly into reality. I thought back over conversations and suddenly found holes, things I couldn’t remember if I’d confirmed. Phantom butterflies flitted around under my rib cage.

  I nudged Caryl’s arm. “Hey.”

  “Hm?” She seemed bored, but I knew Elliott was probably containing an ongoing panic attack.

  “Did Dawnrowan actually say Dame Belinda had a file on me, or did she just say that Dame Belinda said so?”

  Caryl stared at me a moment as she sorted out my question. “She said Barker read to her from the file. That something in it apparently proved to her that you were solely responsible for Claybriar’s change in attitude. Fey have a hard time understanding that just because something is written down, it isn’t necessarily true.”

  “Claybriar was definitely in the room when Dawnrowan mentioned the file?”

  “Yes. When I returned, Alvin and the Seelie monarchs were both still there, and it was shortly after that when the file was mentioned.”

  I turned to Alvin. “You said L1’s files are on the ground floor?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Remind me why that matters?” asked Caryl.

  “I just keep worrying about how fast we can get this done. Because of Fred.”

  Fred was the weakest link in our plan, but he was the best we could do. A former agent no longer on active duty, Fred Winstanley had a friendly relationship with Claybriar from way back. He had agreed to take Sunday third shift guarding the Gate so he could let Clay through after the office was closed, ostensibly to peek at Belinda’s files. In exchange, Clay had arranged a “date” for Fred with a couple of nymph friends.

  “Clay says the L1 Gate room can be locked from the outside,” I said. “So he’s going to lock Fred in for the duration. Once he gets to the ground floor, he lets us in the street entrance. He’ll rifle the files down there while we slip up to the artifact room and steal the Medial Vessel. If Fred ever does tattle about Clay, a few missing papers from my file will explain why he came through the Gate in secret, so there will be no reason to look into it further.”