Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(106)

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 for 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 deli-cate 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.