Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(58)
The tiny front yard of Residence One boasted a lemon tree and several carefully staked tomato plants. A disheveled old woman with stark wide eyes stopped her weeding to stare at us as we walked by and up the front steps.
“Sick sick stinking ugly f*ckpiss!” the woman gargled.
“Hello, Abigail,” replied Caryl. No one but me seemed to find this odd, and I was not in the mood for any more public demonstrations of my ignorance.
The inside of the house looked like the inside of every other house in Southern California; there wasn’t even anything worth stealing. Overwhelmed by ennui, I turned to leave, running headlong into a snickering Teo.
“That just never gets old,” he said, taking me by the shoulders and turning me back around to face the interior. “Don’t know why you bother with the dog sign, Caryl.”
“The fey did not put up that ward for sport, Teo. It is a last resort.”
Teo gave me a push out of the tiny foyer into the living room, and as he did so, the ward released its hold on my -psyche. The shimmering black archway in the center of the living room suddenly struck me as decidedly not normal, and I made a small sound to that effect.
Gloria was at least polite enough to put her hand over her mouth to hide her smile. Tjuan, as always, was tombstone--serious.
The archway looked like a massive ring half-buried in the floor, its inner radius around seven feet. Its foot-wide rim was a metallic gray so dark as to be almost black, and it threw off light like glass. Inside the arch was the part that fried my brain: the space described by the semicircle simply wasn’t there. When I tried to look at it, my visual cortex got some kind of horrible feedback, a cross between a low-grade electric shock and a free fall. My mind filled in the space with a variety of interesting stuff: analog TV fuzz, a gaping black hole, swirls of color like sun on oil on water.
“Stop looking at it,” said Caryl, and I felt the silk of her glove over my eyes. “You will never make sense of it, and you can have a stroke or a seizure if you keep trying.”
I turned to her, aghast, as she took her hand away. “Why would you even put that there!”
“As I’ve mentioned, ours is not the only world under consideration. Gates must be built in the exact same spot in both worlds, which is extraordinarily difficult to balance.”
“Arcadia is on the other side of that?”
“Not if you walk around it,” said Caryl. “But come; that is not what we are here to see.”
27
Caryl led us down a short hallway to what would have been the master bedroom, if this had been a normal house. There was one other bedroom, but the door was shut and there was Latin pop music playing inside.
“Someone lives twenty feet from that thing?” I said. “How?”
“Two people. Luis is blind, and Abigail lives in a separate apartment beneath. Most of our agents live in Residences Four and Five; by the time we built them, we had learned from our earlier mistakes.”
All at once I started shivering and couldn’t stop.
“Someone hold her hand,” said Caryl.
The men both just stared at me, but Gloria slipped her hand into mine, and my body stopped shaking before my brain could remind me that I hated her guts.
“You get used to it,” Gloria said. Her voice grated on my nerves, but the feel of her palm against mine was a comfort that was hardwired into my humanity, all the more powerful because I so rarely felt anything like it anymore.
Gloria let go of my hand when we reached the back bedroom and wiped her palm on her thigh. So much for warm fuzzies.
The room was furnished like an office, with a computer station and cherrywood desk and credenza, filing cabinets and corkboards, office chairs and a couple of armchairs for reading. The only object that seemed unusual was a small device lying flat on the credenza: a tablet computer, perhaps, but designed in the improbable size and shape of a bread plate.
Only as we got closer did I realize it was not an electronic device at all. Its frame was made of a pale silvery wood, and as we approached it, the “screen” trembled ever so slightly, a liquid response that obscured the display. We gathered around close enough to see it, and then Caryl held up an ivory-gloved hand. Hold still, the gesture said, and we obeyed.
As the “screen” settled and became glassy once again, it revealed an image: an open flower with blue-white petals against a burgundy backdrop. The colors were too lush, too raw and textured to have been created by any means I understood. They looked, for lack of a better word, real.
“Show the census,” Caryl said. The petals folded in on themselves, and then a series of golden dots began to appear slowly on the screen, one at a time in random locations, like the beginning of rainfall. I thought I spotted a couple of darker dots as well, but the overwhelming majority were golden, varying slightly in size. They appeared more rapidly for a moment, then began to slow and finally stopped.
Two numbers appeared: 88 and 5. The first figure was silver--gold, the second a dark purplish green. Seelie and Unseelie.
But even as we watched, the Seelie number flickered. Another number fitfully tried to replace the 88, but it came and went subliminally fast, making it impossible for me to read.
“In the past,” said Caryl quietly, “the display has only done this at the moment when a fey was in transit via one of the Gates. It would show, for example, both eighty-eight and eighty-seven during a fey’s exit, but would settle at eighty-seven afterward.”