Phantom Pains: Volume 2 (Arcadia Project, The, Band 2) - Softcover

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Mishell Baker is the author of the Nebula and World Fantasy Award Finalist Borderline, which was also a Tiptree Honor book, as well as the second and third books in The Arcadia Project, Phantom Pains and Impostor Syndrome. She is a 2009 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Redstone Science Fiction, and Electric Velocipede. She has a website at MishellBaker.com and frequently Tweets about writing, parenthood, mental health, and assorted geekery at @MishellBaker. When she’s not attending conventions or going on wild research adventures, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.

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Phantom Pains

1

Here’s the thing about PTSD: it doesn’t understand the rules. When I was seven, for example, I stepped in a nest of fire ants and ran screaming for two blocks, so crazed with pain and panic I didn’t notice I’d run over a broken bottle until I saw the smears of red on my front steps. And still I spent every summer barefoot after that, at least until I got drunk at twenty-five and lost both feet in a seven-story fall.

Then there was that time I choked the life out of a bloodsucking mantis-woman who’d just killed two of my friends. I slept like a baby afterward. And yet somehow, four months later, when I picked up the office phone at Valiant Studios and heard the voice of a nineteen-year-old warlock, I turned into a sweating iceberg at my desk.

“Millie? Are you there?” Caryl Vallo said. That voice, that impossible middle-aged rasp that made you forget she couldn’t buy beer. She sounded calm, so she must have had her familiar out. He was probably perched on her shoulder, tail wrapped amiably around her neck as she cradled the phone to her ear with a gloved hand.

“I’m here,” I said.

“You seem to be settling in well at Valiant,” she said in a tone that implied she couldn’t have cared less, but four months ago I’d held her bloodstained hand on a nearby soundstage while she waited to die, so I knew differently.

“Well enough, I guess.” I pushed back from the massive U-shaped desk Araceli and I shared, glancing over my shoulder at Inaya’s closed office door. Araceli was out running an errand, but Inaya’s door wasn’t exactly soundproof, so honesty wasn’t wise here. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you, Caryl. I’ve left how many messages now?”

“Twenty-eight, all told.”

“Well, here you are, so let’s not waste time on why you’ve been dodging my calls. Dare I hope you’re actually going to come down to the studio?”

“I should like to come tomorrow, if that’s agreeable.” She always had the strangest way of talking.

“Can I ask what brought on this sudden change of heart?”

“I’ve just been informed that the head of the United States Arcadia Project and one of his senior agents are flying out from New Orleans for a visit. It would be helpful if Inaya could give them a glowing review of my performance as regional manager.”

“Ah.” I noted my disappointment without judging myself for it, as my shrink had taught me. “Would you like me to put you through to Inaya, then?”

“I don’t need to disturb her,” she said. “Just let me know when you’d be free to open up the soundstage. I can give her my report directly afterward.”

I scooted my chair closer to my desk and lowered my voice. “I can go in there with you, if it will help.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line, and I knew that even if she’d been in the room I would have had difficulty interpreting it.

“Yes,” she said then. “I think that would be best. I’ll have my familiar with me of course, so you don’t need to worry that I’ll—cause trouble.”

“Caryl, the only person your feelings are any trouble to is you.”

Another silence.

“Around two p.m. tomorrow would work,” I said when I got tired of waiting for her reply. I tried to remember what her face looked like and found I couldn’t. That was partly the fault of lingering brain damage, but mostly it was due to the extraordinary efforts she went to not to be memorable. “I’ve kind of missed you,” I said.

“I’ve missed you too, Millie,” she surprised me by saying. Then she ended the call, probably afraid she’d overload her familiar with all the feelings she was refusing to feel. That was the whole point of him: a miniature dragon-shaped carry-on bag for the traumatized mess that Dr. Davis would have called her Emotion Mind. I could have used a trick like that myself, but not being a warlock or a wizard, I had to deal with my mental health issues the old-fashioned way: by paying a lot of money to talk to people about them.

I put the phone back in its cradle and glanced at Inaya’s door again, then at the assortment of Post-it notes that littered the fringes of my monitor. I reached for the pad to tear off yet another, scrawled CARYL WED OCT 14 2P.M. on it, and found an open spot to stick it.

My computer, of course, was installed with all manner of productivity software, but digital information had a stubborn way of slithering out of my consciousness. Something about the physical placement of paper helped me to remember, or at the very least to remember that I’d forgotten something and check the paper to see what it was.

Even with Araceli to handle most of the complicated stuff, if Inaya hadn’t owed me a massive debt and needed someone on her team who knew about the Arcadia Project, I’d have been fired in the first week. I was pretty good at mobilizing people and getting answers from them, but the rest of my job was tailor-made to remind me hourly of my weaknesses: low stress tolerance, faulty memory, general misanthropy. I sometimes fantasized about quitting, but this job beat scrubbing deep fryers, and Dr. Davis said I needed to push myself, especially when it came to memory. Even a damaged brain has a remarkable ability to pave neurological detours around the rubble.

Still, getting a phone call from the woman who had fired me from far more interesting work wasn’t helping endear this job to me.

I was under no circumstances allowed to bother Inaya if her door was closed, so I rose carefully from my desk chair and came out from behind the semi-oval shared workspace to get the blood flowing back down what remained of my left thigh. My AK prosthesis was designed for walking, not sitting. Inaya had offered to convert my half of the workstation into a standing desk, but I’d refused; my mind balked at that gesture of commitment.

When I felt a long, slow buzz in my pocket, I cringed; the only person who used my cell for voice calls was Parisa Naderi, showrunner of Maneaters and human wrecking ball. I considered just letting it go to voice mail, but then I worried she’d call Inaya directly, and I’d have to mop up the carnage. So I answered.

“I need to see Inaya,” she said shortly. “Ten minutes should do it, as soon as you can get me in.”

“You’ll want to talk to Araceli about scheduling,” I said, glancing over at her empty chair out of habit.

“Araceli said Inaya wasn’t available today. So I’m calling you. Make it happen.”

I suppressed the first five responses that came to mind, breathing in deeply through my nose. “As Inaya doesn’t keep her own schedule, I’m afraid all I could do would be to call Araceli myself, and she would tell me the same thing. I do have some good news for you, though.”

“Tell me it’s about stage 13.”

“It is.”

“Ya Bahá’u’l-Abhá!” I had no idea what that meant, but it was unmistakably joyful, and it made me smile. I wasn’t used to joy from Naderi.

“We’ve got an inspector coming tomorrow,” I said. “She should be able to tell us what steps need to...