Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  My primary responsibilities in the aftermath were to oversee the transfer of Caveat into Tjuan’s facade and to get Brand set up with an Arcadia Project contract. I was riding such a wave of competence and normality that I even remembered to text Zach to tell him I wasn’t dead.

  He responded, ok

  When I got that text, I rolled my eyes so hard they almost fell out. Unfortunately I’m now awaiting trial for obstruction of justice, I added.

  After about five minutes, he texted back, u r a piece of work girl

  But then, not long after, let me know what u need, i’m around. He was all right, sometimes.

  What I needed, at least for now, was to bury myself in work. Shock was as good as his word about helping Caveat with the facade—he even knew where Qualm had stashed its weapon—but he refused to tell us anything about what was going on with his father. Apparently, he’d already made a binding promise to that effect.

  Shiverlash, as far as any of us could tell, had vanished off the face of the earth. I didn’t expect to hear from her again. I’d thrown in with the sidhe, and so our alliance, such as it had been, was null and void. I could only hope that she would at least hear about my efforts to free the spirits and be pleased enough not to turn on us the minute she was finished with Winterglass.

  One small bright spot was that Brand and Naderi got to spend some quality time together as we fully initiated him into the Project. It was going to take me some time to get used to the radiant smile she wore with that bird perched on her shoulder, but she would need that serenity to deal with the media onslaught she was about to endure when she finally went ahead and rehired T. J. Miller as her supervising producer.

  But first things first.

  Once Caveat-Tjuan was fully operational, she/he walked into the police station carrying the same blue steel revolver and wearing the same clothes as in the infamous security video. She/he confessed in detail to the crime, but refused to show any ID or give the police a name. A run of the body’s prints turned up nothing, since fingerprints aren’t genetic. “John Doe” exploded into the headlines, his identical mug shot shown next to Tjuan’s as American social media lost its collective mind.

  And still, even with John Doe locked up, they wouldn’t just let Tjuan out. Another day or two, they said. Dot the fucking is, cross the fucking ts.

  I was about ready to assault someone with a deadly weapon myself at this point.

  My only comfort? They had to withdraw some of my charges, as I was no longer aiding or abetting anything. Obstruction of justice, though? On that I was still fucked. Lying to cops is lying to cops. Alvin said he’d see what he could do to influence the trial, but either way, March was not going to be a fun month for me.

  All in all, I decided I preferred Seelie justice.

  • • •

  It was a beaten, tired Dame Belinda who met with us in Los Angeles to negotiate terms at the Omni. Alvin had asked that Caryl and I attend the meeting; also in attendance was Tracy Wong from New York, who turned out to be a portly, middle-aged man with shaved temples and an almost distressingly dapper suit. Somehow I ended up sitting between him and Dame Belinda; Caryl was across from me, seeming much too far away.

  “We’re not out for revenge,” said Alvin to Belinda once everyone was settled and introduced. “All we want is for the Arcadia Project to be run successfully and humanely, and for you not to interfere with us any further.”

  “You make a grave mistake if you do not keep me on as a consultant at the very least,” said Dame Belinda. “My experience—”

  “Hold your tongue,” said Caryl in a voice so icy we all turned to look at her. The expression on her face made me wish I hadn’t. It was as cold and empty as uncharted space.

  Even Dame Belinda faltered in the face of that look. She turned to Alvin with equal parts affront and entreaty.

  “While I, uh, am not exactly comfortable with Miss Vallo’s choice of tone,” Alvin said, “I think, given that you’ve outright lied to the people under your command to hide your crimes, your words have lost a lot of weight with the people in this room. So I wouldn’t waste more energy on them than necessary.”

  “Very well then,” said Dame Belinda. “If you have already decided what you intend to do with me, by all means inform me.”

  “First let’s look at the facts. You not only ordered the abduction of Caryl Vallo at the age of eleven months, but you also oversaw the execution or outright murder of everyone aside from Vivian Chandler who knew about the abduction, including Martin Reyes, the last Western regional manager.”

  “Soon enough,” Dame Belinda said, “you will understand why it was necessary to make certain sacrifices in order to keep the Unseelie Court under Project control.”

  “Right,” I broke in. “Always important for the good guys to torture babies and inflict pulmonary embolisms on innocent men so that nothing evil happens.”

  “Millie,” said Alvin in a warning tone.

  “May we please proceed with whatever punishment you have decided?” said Dame Belinda wearily. “I have never been an avid fan of suspense.”

  “Obviously,” said Alvin, “we will require your immediate resignation from the Arcadia Project. What’s up for discussion now is whether we remove the related memories.”

  For the first time since Qualm had revealed her crimes last autumn, I saw Dame Belinda look frightened. “And just what would that leave me with?” she said. “I have given my entire life to the Arcadia Project. I have put aside thoughts of family and outside interests for more than sixty years.”

  “It wasn’t charity,” broke in Tracy Wong of all people. “You’ve enjoyed a seat at the apex of supernatural power on this planet, and you’ve operated with godlike impunity. If King Winterglass hadn’t stumbled across Caryl and just happened to be the sort of person who thought he should return her to where she belonged, we still wouldn’t even know about that. Which leads to the question, what have you done that we don’t know about?”

  “Anything you’d like to share?” said Alvin. “This would be a good time to come clean.”

  “It will make no difference,” said Belinda, all the life draining out of her eyes as she sat back in her chair. “You have decided to crucify me for all the sins of—”

  “No,” Caryl broke in. Her tone had a wobbly edge that caused everyone to turn and look at her. Her eyes had gone flat and glassy. She took in a deep breath, steadied her voice. “No. I will not sit here and let you compare yourself to Jesus Christ, of all people. You are a liar, a torturer, and a murderer.” As she spoke, I felt an odd pressure behind my ears, as though I’d ascended to a higher altitude.

  “Everyone take a breath,” said Tracy Wong firmly enough to bring attention back to him. “We can’t force Dame Belinda to feel remorse for anything she’s done. All we can do is make sure she doesn’t do it again. To be honest, I was in favor of execution by lethal injection. I know a guy.”

  “But that isn’t how the new Arcadia Project is going to do things,” Alvin said firmly, giving Tracy a steady look.

  “If you plan to take all my memories away,” said Dame Belinda, “you may as well execute me. I see little difference.”

  Alvin leaned forward on his elbows. “Is there any other way you can reassure us that, even if you retain your memories of the Arcadia Project, you will in no way attempt to use your old contacts or influence the Project’s activities?”

  Dame Belinda looked at him blankly.

  “Why are we even considering letting her go with all her memories intact?” I said. “Anyone who gets let go from the Project gets their memory wiped, right?”

  “Those were the old rules,” said Alvin. “But the old rules, in themselves, are so heavily wrapped up in the idea of tyrannical control of information by an elite few that I’m not even sure they’re valid anymore. We’re going to have to rethink the entire thing from the ground up, but that’s not the issue right now. My main source of hesitation here is that Belinda’s knowledge
and experience are unique, and if we—”

  “Do you like the smell of cedar?” said Caryl.

  Everyone turned to look at her. She seemed remarkably calm; it was only my intimate knowledge of her various stress levels that made the hairs rise on the back of my neck. This was that bitterly cold level past 10 that I didn’t even have a name for. A name occurred to me now, though. Unseelie.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Alvin.

  “Do you like the smell of cedar?” she repeated. I felt it again, that sensation as though my ears were about to pop. “Most people find it pleasant.”

  “I . . . guess I do,” said Alvin uneasily.

  “If I catch even the slightest whiff of it,” said Caryl, “I vomit. The cage they kept me in was carved from cedar, because the smell of it helped mask the smell of my urine, I suppose.”

  “Caryl . . . ,” said Alvin with infinite compassion. “I know—”

  “No,” she growled, cutting him off.

  A pale light flickered in her eyes, a greenish glow like swamp gas, swift as heat lightning. A ringing began in my left ear.

  “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know what I’ve hidden from all of you, for your sakes. Barker isn’t the only one who can keep secrets. You don’t know that I had to put a poster of an open field on the back of my front door so that I could close it without screaming. You don’t know how many years it took for Martin to cure me of the idea that anything moving was on its way to cut me, or to splash icy water over me to cut the stench, or to prod me with thorny branches and make me cry just to feed off of my misery. You don’t know what I, and Martin, and my therapists had to go through just to make me fit to mingle with the likes of you.”

  “You’re right,” said Alvin. “I don’t. I’m sorry. And if I could go back, if I could undo everything that was done to you—”

  “The person who did it is right there, and you’re considering slapping her wrist and letting her walk away because she has useful experience.”

  Tracy cleared his throat, gave Alvin a significant look.

  Alvin rubbed his forehead and sighed. “If I—if I agreed to Tracy’s idea,” he said. “I’m not saying I can. But if I did, if I agreed to give her a lethal injection, would that satisfy you?”

  “No,” she said.

  Alvin blinked.

  “Not at all,” Caryl said firmly. “You would euthanize her, like a faithful pet who deserves an end to its suffering? Let her drift peacefully out of a world she has held in her iron grip for half a century?”

  “Caryl,” said Alvin. “You can’t be asking me to deliberately hurt her, to torture her.”

  “People can survive torture, can’t they?” There was an edge of hysteria in her voice, and the room’s pressure dropped again, sharply. Now everyone noticed; I saw them noticing. “Torture is something we can all just move on from, heal from and become productive members of society again, throw away like a stained coat. Let’s give her a chance to prove that, shall we?”

  “Caryl,” I said, sliding my hand toward her on the tabletop. “No. If you can’t control yourself, you need to—”

  She leaped to her feet, chair stuttering backward behind her and then falling onto its side. “Don’t tell me what I need. I know what I need.”

  The room filled with a choking, soporific haze. My eyes watered; I yawned; everything tilted crazily, and I nearly slid out of my chair. Only a strong grip on the table kept me upright.

  When I dragged my gaze back up to Caryl, I saw her standing wreathed in pale fire, her eyes blank glowing voids. She stared at Dame Belinda as though everyone else in the room had vanished.

  “You did not flinch,” Caryl said, “from sowing the seeds. Do not flinch from the harvest.”

  She began to recite something noxious in the Unseelie tongue, and Dame Belinda lifted her hands in horror. At first I thought she was trying to ward something off, but no. The flesh was rotting off those hands as we watched. This was no illusion; we could all see it, smell it. Alvin retched, and Tracy pitched forward onto the table in a dead faint.

  I struggled to my feet and went to Caryl, grabbed her wrists, but she was still droning God knew what. Dame Belinda began weeping blood, hands still dropping bits of rancid flesh onto the table.

  Belinda made a faint mewling sound and fell from her chair, crawling toward the door on her ruined hands. When she tried to rise up onto her knees to turn the knob, I heard a horrible crunch, and she fell over onto her side with a cry. Her eyes were wide with pain, still dripping crimson tears.

  “Caryl! Stop!” I sobbed. “Just kill her!”

  Caryl ignored me. I put my hand over her mouth, and she struggled, silent now. But she couldn’t undo what she’d done, and I knew she had no intention of ending the woman’s misery. I held Caryl the way I’d hold a plagued corpse, wanting nothing but to keep it away from other people.

  Dame Belinda’s bleeding eyes met mine from across the room, a silent plea for me to do something. It occurred to me that I would likely never hear her speak again. And yet in this moment, it was me she looked to, not Caryl and not Alvin, who had somehow found the courage or numbness to approach and kneel helplessly next to her.

  Why me?

  You are every bit as clever and stubborn as I was at your age.

  Something gave way inside me, broke, releasing some homemade narcotic into my system. A weird calm settled over me, and I spoke in Caryl’s ear, softly.

  “Kill her,” I said. “Quickly. Or you and I are finished.”

  Her hesitation broke my heart. But finally, vengefully, spitefully, she detonated the woman’s skull as though she’d held a gun to it at point-blank range. Alvin was splattered with gore, and he sat stunned, past screaming, past anything. He looked as dead as the corpse that fell, limp as a doll, across his knees.

  49

  Dissociation can actually be fairly useful, under the right circumstances, which may be why Borderlines experience it to begin with. For a weird ten minutes or so I was the only calm person in the room. Belinda was nothing but a mess that needed to be cleaned up, Caryl was nothing but an inert, sobbing obstacle that had to be carefully placed in a chair before I could attend to the two humans in the room.

  Tracy was the first to recover; Alvin was busy dry-heaving when I finally got Tracy to help me move Belinda’s headless body aside so that the door could, in theory, be opened eventually. I tried to minimize the amount of blood I got on my clothes in the process, but even that decision was very detached; it was simply an unpleasant-smelling red substance that I didn’t want all over me.

  There was a pitcher of water and some napkins on a table against the far wall, so I went to Alvin next and cleaned the unpleasant red substance off his face as well as I could. There was nothing to do about his clothes, but the cold water seemed to calm him. As I started to move away, he closed a hand gently around my wrist. I glanced to him to see what he needed to say, but he just looked up at me, mute.

  “We’re going to call someone,” I said. “I know the Project must have cleanup people. We’ve disappeared gory bodies before. I just need to find out who to call.”

  Alvin just kept looking at me.

  “Caryl,” I said. “Who took care of Teo and Vivian? Can you call them?”

  “You should kill me, too,” Caryl said in a strange voice.

  “For fuck’s sake!” I said, my voice breaking. “I can’t do this by myself. Is there one adult in this room? Caryl, I need you to call Elliott.”

  “After what I just—”

  “Do it.”

  She spoke his name, but nothing more. In a moment he projected his illusion into my mind.

  “Elliott,” I said. “Caryl fucked up again. Bad, this time. She’s— We put her in a room with Dame Belinda, and she didn’t have you.”

  “I understand,” said Elliott.

  “The spirit she used,” I said. “Can you get its name, so that someone can call it home?”

  “There are several,”
he said. “I am already talking with them.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s—okay. Um, then I’ll need you to take Caryl’s emotions for a little while, so we can get this mess cleaned up.”

  “All right,” said Elliott. He paused, then: “I shouldn’t have left her. She wasn’t ready. This is my fault.”

  “Not really,” I said. “But if it motivates you to help, fine.”

  He disappeared, and in a moment Caryl rose from her chair, as cool and composed as the day I’d met her.

  “Well, this is a nightmare,” she said blandly.

  I blinked at her. It was like facing an entirely different woman from the one who’d made a bloody mess of the wall.

  I cleared my throat. “Do we know someone who can . . . who can make this all go away?”

  “More or less,” she said. “It will be complicated, and require misdirection of the hotel staff, but it can be done. I have handled worse.”

  “I— Really. Wow.”

  “I shall stay here until the cleaners arrive. Alvin should remain here also, as he does not seem well enough to travel, and because as my superior, he should decide what becomes of me. Tracy, take Millie back to the Residence.”

  Tracy had the foresight to take a plastic bag out of the empty trash can for me to hold before we got into his rental car. It was a good thing, because getting the smell of vomit out of leather seats can be a bitch. Don’t ask me how I know.

  • • •

  I never got a full report of what Alvin and Caryl and the “cleaners” did to get that body out of there and the blood out of the carpet, but I’m pretty sure that nobody at the Omni had a clue about the grisly murder that had taken place in that little meeting room, given that they still let us hold our international summit at the hotel the following day.