Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  His skin was waxy, dead. This was no empty facade, but the fresh corpse of a teenager. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

  Everyone was going to die. This plan was going to kill us all. Everyone I loved, bones in the dirt, like Teo, like Gloria, like Vivian’s dust and the dust of her facade somewhere in the in-between, its animating spark ripped away forever by my iron hands.

  But then Shock’s hand gripped mine tight, and he sat up.

  And so did Tjuan.

  Not Tjuan. Elliott.

  “We’ve done it,” Shock said breathlessly.

  Elliott looked at his new, long-fingered hands, moved his face around seemingly at random.

  “It will take a while,” said Elliott in Tjuan’s voice, a little hoarsely, “for me to become accustomed to operating this body.”

  “You have until tomorrow morning,” I said. Then I reached into my pocket, pulled out the Medial Vessel. I pressed it into Shock’s hands.

  “Is this—?”

  “It is,” I said. “If I had any doubt left that you were with us a hundred percent, it’s gone now. Keep this safe, and don’t give it back to me until there’s enough blood in it to save us all.”

  25

  “You just ran a red light, Caryl.”

  It was the first thing I’d said to her since we’d gotten into the car on that awful Tuesday morning, because she didn’t seem inclined to talk, and I had enough on my mind to keep me busy. But some things can’t really pass without comment.

  “It is customary in Los Angeles to make left turns during yellow lights,” said Caryl, “due to the inexplicable shortage of left turn arrows at intersections.” No stammering, but her face was flushed, her hands unsteady. About a 7. Not great for driving.

  “That light was decidedly red, Caryl. Just because the guy in front of you has time to go, that doesn’t mean you necessarily do. And, not for nothing, maybe the day we’re going to pick up a wanted fugitive is not the greatest day to attract the attention of the authorities.”

  “I’m sorry!” she snapped. Then added bitterly: “At least marry me before you start harping on my driving.”

  The blood rushed to my face, and I leaned my head against the passenger-side window. There was absolutely no safe reply to that.

  “Did you mean what you said, in Arcadia?”

  Oh brother.

  “I said a lot of things, Caryl.”

  “Don’t pretend to be stupid. You said you loved me.”

  “Please, Caryl, just focus on driving. I’m really nervous about today.”

  “As am I. And I need to know, before we risk our lives together, exactly what I am to you.”

  My temper exploded in one white-hot burst, and I slammed my fist so hard into the dashboard it made her jump.

  “No!” I said. “You do not!”

  “Millie—”

  “No! You’re my boss—which makes this harassment, by the way—but you are not the boss of my goddamned thoughts. What happened, happened. Regret it or feel smug about it or whatever you want, but you do not get to own my feelings about it. Those are mine.”

  To that she had no reply. We drove in silence until we got to the motel. She pulled into one of the parking spaces in the narrow lot, but kept the car running.

  “He should be expecting you,” she said, her voice trembling. God, she was going to get us killed on the way back. I should have said something, anything, to calm her.

  I nodded, unable to speak, and got out of the car.

  The weather was strangely beautiful, one of those audaciously sunny days you sometimes get in February here, a fake spring. Even the cracked parking lot, strewn at the corners with Dorito bags and cigarette boxes and sheets of unused coupons, couldn’t take the glory away from that sky. I kept my eyes turned up as I walked, breathing in the calming blue, imagining it filling my entire body.

  I knocked on the door to room 2. It took way too long for him to answer, and my palms were getting sweaty by the time the door opened. But then there he was. The real Tjuan, alive and warm and smelling of shaving cream—this I knew because I hugged him.

  “God I’ve missed you,” I said.

  “Quit it,” he said, peeling me off. “Let’s go. You can have shotgun.”

  I grinned at him, but said nothing, so “shotgun” was the last word spoken before we got into the car. It seemed to hang there, too loud in the still air. I could still hear it in my head—shotgun—as Caryl began to back the SUV out of the parking space.

  Looking out the passenger-side window into that blue, blue day, with Tjuan’s most recent word echoing, I saw the patrol car come lurching up the badly paved drive and stop at an angle, blocking our exit.

  Time, at this point, came unhinged from itself. Ticked by one agonizing frame at a time, or skipped chunks entirely, or played back in loops.

  The last coherent thought I had was, Don’t panic. When this was, in fact, a damned good reason to panic.

  I’d been spending weeks flipping out at every tiny thing—a weird smile, an unknown number that was probably just Alondra’s boyfriend or girlfriend, the creak of the house settling—and now I was in a car with a fugitive, hemmed in by cops, and I felt a strange, numbing calm.

  “GET OUT OF THE VEHICLE WITH YOUR HANDS UP.”

  I looked at Tjuan. I noticed the shape of his skull under his skin. Those gorgeous cheekbones. His eyes were flat, dead as the facade’s, as he opened the car door and let in a slab of yellow sun. I stared at his back as he got out, hands in the air.

  The police were still shouting orders. The words ran together now, but I knew what I was supposed to do. I opened the car door and got out, hands raised. Lights flashed. The sky was so blue.

  The car was also a barricade. Two uniforms were behind it, pointing guns at us. There was a gun pointed directly at me.

  The gun came closer. A woman, dark and fierce, grabbing me and pushing me to my knees. I fell forward. I don’t know if she pushed me, or if I fell. My face was against warm concrete, and I felt handcuffs cinch tight against my wrists.

  I stayed silent; I had that right. Why wasn’t she telling me? Weren’t they supposed to tell me that?

  Her hands were rough, but I felt them hesitate when they started patting down the legs of my jeans.

  “You’ve got prosthetic legs?” she said.

  “Yes,” I managed to say. “Double amputee. I . . . can’t get up without my arms.”

  She just left me lying there, on my face in the parking lot. I turned my head to the side, tried to see what was happening. They were putting Tjuan in the back of the car that had blocked us in. His shadow was sharp on the pavement. Somehow there were already two more cop cars.

  Two completely different armed men walked up to me, hoisted me to my feet, bruising my arms. Walked me past the car they’d put Tjuan in. One of them put his hand on my head, shoved me into the back of a different car. It was dark in there, after all that sun.

  Being in the car made me feel safer. Distanced from all the noise and chaos outside. At least one more new car had pulled up. But I was a passenger now, waiting to take a ride somewhere. My mind stubbornly edited out the handcuffs.

  More blaring of orders. “GET OUT OF THE VEHICLE OR WE WILL SEND IN THE DOGS.”

  There were dogs? But they had Tjuan already.

  Caryl. They were sending dogs after Caryl. I thought of Brand savaging her forearm, the hot red spray of her blood.

  Whatever was happening out there took long enough that I was finished crying before the two men got into the front of the car and started to drive me away.

  “I’ve never been arrested before.” My voice sounded friendly. Insane under the circumstances.

  “Then let me give you some advice,” said the uniform in the driver’s seat. “Whatever you’re told to do, just do it. Don’t get clever. We’ve seen everything. Tell the truth and cooperate and this will all go faster.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” echoed the uniform on t
he passenger side, and then laughed. I didn’t understand the joke.

  “Am I going to jail?” I asked as politely as I could.

  “Oh, absolutely, ma’am,” said the one on the passenger side, just as politely.

  I didn’t say anything else after that.

  • • •

  At the station they put me in a little room with Tjuan. I don’t know what they were doing while we waited. He looked so hollow.

  “You didn’t do anything,” I said to him. “You didn’t shoot that guy, so they can’t possibly prove that you did.”

  He didn’t say anything. He just sat there, staring empty eyed at the wall.

  “They can’t prove you did something you didn’t do!” I insisted. Tears in my eyes now.

  “Please stop talking,” he said. And once he’d said that, almost immediately they came to get me. I wondered if the last thing I would ever hear him say was please stop talking. It was fitting. It was so Tjuan.

  Was he still going to be Tjuan, after this? No, I couldn’t think that far. Couldn’t look past this frame, this moment. That way lay madness.

  Now they said the whole thing: right to remain silent, anything I said could be used against me, all that. I was dimly aware that the Project probably had lawyers on retainer for crap like this, but I didn’t have any phone numbers on me, and I wasn’t thinking straight anyway. I was also that stupid girl who thinks that because she’s innocent, she doesn’t need a lawyer.

  “Where were you taking him?” asked the older white woman they’d sent to interrogate me. I didn’t remember seeing her before. “What was the plan?”

  “We were just going to take him back to the house. We thought it was safe.”

  “You thought that the man with the gunshot wound would just forget the whole thing, and the police would decide it was all okay and we’d just let the shooter go?”

  “Tjuan didn’t shoot anyone.”

  “Who is it you think did it? Does he have a twin brother?”

  “He must. That’s all I can say. I was with him when the news said this happened. Noon on January twenty-third, right? I was sitting in the kitchen eating cake with him.”

  “But you have no proof of this.”

  “I didn’t know I was going to need it.”

  “You lied to the officer who came to question you at the house. That’s obstruction of justice. Do you understand how serious that is?”

  “No! I never lied!” I blurted it out without thinking. A Borderline thing. I was so convinced of my injured innocence that the facts got fuzzy in my head.

  “You said you didn’t know where Mr. Miller was.”

  I had no response to that. My skin felt cold all over.

  “Who was driving that car?”

  They hadn’t gotten Caryl, then. No one would be ripping off her gloves, pressing her bare hands into ink, putting her in the system. How convenient, to be able to make yourself invisible. Who had she enslaved to save herself, to walk away while a cop shoved my face into the pavement?

  “I’m going to remain silent now,” I said. Should have said that at the start.

  It was all slow, so fucking slow.

  They took my name and social security number. They took my fingerprints. They took my picture. They took my phone. They even took off my prosthetics, searched them, gave them back. I couldn’t get the seals right again, so I shuffled around like a kid in her dad’s shoes, trying to keep them from falling off. I had to sign a little paper saying that was all I’d had on me. My fingertips were black from the ink, and the pen felt weird in my hand, too thin.

  It took so long that by the time they transported me to the jail in Lynwood it was pitch-black outside, I had that fuzzy late-night feeling in my head, and a bail bondsman was already waiting there to get me out.

  I have never loved someone quite the way I loved that short, beefy black man with the pushed-in pug-dog face. I nearly fell over from gratitude. I found religion. I made a thousand silent promises of future perfection.

  “What about my friend?” I asked him. “What about Tjuan?”

  “Nothing I can do.” His voice wasn’t as kind as his face. “His bail was set at a million, and no bondsman in their right mind would take a flight risk like that, even if someone could afford it.”

  “What?” I stared at him. “So he’s still in jail right now? I can’t just leave him in jail.”

  “You have two choices, ma’am: leave here with me, or stay the night.”

  26

  Phil drove me home in what had been Teo’s car. He was silent until we’d gotten a good distance away from the jail, and then he said, “We need to get Tjuan out of there.”

  I tried to think despite a pounding headache. “Maybe we can. Elliott is in a facade of Tjuan at the moment.”

  “I know.”

  “We could send him to the police station. Shock may know where the weapon ended up. We could put the gun right in the facade’s pocket.”

  “And send Elliott to jail?” said Phil.

  “I don’t know, he could fake a heart attack or something, leave the facade once it was in there. Except . . . the body wouldn’t die. It would just . . . sit there, warm, without a heartbeat.”

  “Are we caring about that?” said Phil. “Are we caring about the Code of Silence more than we are about Tjuan?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I massaged my head. “I’ve had kind of a day.”

  “Sorry,” said Phil. “You and Caryl figure it out.”

  “Caryl? She’s all right?”

  “She’s the one who called me, Millie. And the bail bondsman.”

  Of course.

  Another idea hit me. “Qualm. We have Qualm now. Shock can put Qualm into the facade!”

  “And then Qualm will snap the kid’s neck. Great idea.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  We couldn’t actually make Qualm do anything. Only Winterglass could do that, and he wouldn’t do shit for me until I got him that vial.

  We were silent after that on the long drive back to the North University Park district in the dead of night. When Phil let me back into the house, the clock on the wall in the living room said seven after three. The house was quiet.

  “Where’s Elliott?” I whispered to Phil.

  “In Arcadia,” he said. Good. I wasn’t sure I could stand to see him right now, walking around in my partner’s skin.

  Phil’s room was downstairs, so I left him, heading straight to the upstairs bathroom to shower. I sat on my little plastic stool and let the water pound me, wanting it to scour off every skin cell that touched anything in that place.

  I couldn’t wash off my record, though. Charged with obstruction of justice, arraignment set for mid-March. Even if Tjuan got cleared of all charges, I had broken the law, and that made me a criminal.

  Maybe that should have made it easier for me to calmly pull off a heist, but without Tjuan I had no contingency plan, no exit strategy. If this had been a movie, I’d have gone ahead, called it additional motivation to do things right. But this was Caryl and Claybriar and Shock, people who had been (mostly) good to me, people whose lives I couldn’t just throw away.

  I dried off, put on a T-shirt and shorts to sleep in, and wheeled myself back down the hall to my room, trying to make my exhausted brain think past the missing piece in my perfectly balanced plan.

  I still had one “Tjuan”; I still had an Ironbones to use as a threat to the second standing stone. But Elliott couldn’t be in two places at once, and I didn’t want even the slightest risk that a real Ironbones might touch the stone at the same time I did. The whole point was that it had to be the real Tjuan making the final threat.

  It didn’t work now. But I had to make it work, or Tjuan was going to spend the next decade behind bars, and Dame Belinda was probably going to find ways to get the rest of us too.

  At some point I stopped pretending that I was trying to patch up my plan and just sat on my bed crying.

  “Get some sl
eep,” said a tiny voice nearby.

  I started and turned to find Caveat in her winged iguana form.

  “Were you watching me in the shower, too?”

  “Sorry. Caryl asked me to. Was worried you might harm yourself.”

  Despite everything, I suddenly felt so fucking proud of Caryl that, even without Elliott, she’d thought to save herself, to call the bail bondsman, to have a spirit watch out for me. She was being a goddamned regional manager. At twenty. She’d grown up in a cage and she was handling this better than I was.

  “You need to sleep,” Caveat repeated, “or you’ll be no help to anyone. Caryl has contacted Queen Dawnrowan to let her know what happened and why the meeting is delayed. But we still need to follow through.”

  “Is that you talking, or Caryl sending a message through you?”

  The little spirit was silent for a moment, and I felt the weight of her hesitation.

  “Caveat,” I said, “what is it?”

  “Have you ever wondered,” she said, “why I can speak to you at all? Why Elliott was able to recruit me?”

  “To be honest, I’ve had other things on my mind. But you do make me curious.”

  “I’m not like the other spirits.”

  “You’re . . . more like Elliott,” I said. “Like the wraiths. You—you’ve been exposed to human thought.”

  “Not by choice,” she said. “I’ve been watching this city for a long time, longer than you’ve been alive. Spirits can see through the barrier, you know. We just can’t cross it at will.”

  “That’s . . . creepy.”

  “I crossed it once by accident. It happens sometimes.”

  “Right,” I said, arranging myself more comfortably on the bed. “Traumatic or intensely emotional events. That’s what causes hauntings, apparently, and certain miracles. We learned about that last fall, and we’ve been working on getting it added to the Project handbook. So you’re saying some kind of trauma pulled you over?”

  “A fast-food place. A gunman came in, opened fire on the crowd.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “I’m what you might call . . . a spirit of extreme caution. I merged with a small boy as he decided to be very still, to hide. He watched seven other people die.”