Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(100)

“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.”